Re: [Gretl-devel] "shadowing" over-diagnostics

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: Oleh originally proposed pkg_name.fun_name. My initial response was just based on the fact that this would currently be illegal. Aside from '.' as decimal point (a context that is easily distinguished), '.' in hansl is reserved for bundle membership. Punctuation characters are scarce, and much in demand for use as operators and other syntactic elements. It's true, if you double up such a character, as in "::", you get something that is not acceptable in general, and so could be given a special syntactical import. Then we would have to distinguish between "valid identifier for hansl object in general" and "valid identifier for a function inside a package". Not impossible but an extra layer of complication. Oleh says that my suggestion -- namely, "pkgname_funname" -- could "introduce a new mess". I don't see that. Since underscore is accepted in all hansl identifiers my suggestion does not distinguish with 100% confidence between a name given to a function within a package and a name that happens to be identical in both components and copula, given to some "random" user-function. But the confidence is surely not far off 100%, if the package has a reasonably specific name. And whatever the collision probability, it would certainly be reduced, never increased, if package-writers were to follow a recommendation to prepend "<pkgname>_" to their function names. Allin