From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2006-01-20T00:10:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Rake 0.7.0 Released

why_ wrote:
> This looks very interesting, but I don't understand why you went with a 
> single colon instead of the most common double colon.

Good question!

There were a number of different delimiter characters I considered.  The 
"/" was a possibility but I felt there would be too much confusion with 
file pathnames.  I looked at ways of overloading an operator on symbols 
so that I could say things like

  task :main.build

(notice the task name is not quoted).  But in the end felt that the 
single colon worked fine without introducing too many ambiguities.

Would a double colon have worked?  I'm sure it would.  And the implied 
relationship to Ruby Modules/Class name scoping might have been an 
advantage.  But then, it might have been a disadvantage as well, for 
Rake namespaces are not the same thing as Ruby Modules.  It was a toss 
up and the single colon won in my mind.

-- Jim Weirich

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