From: Doc O'Leary <droleary@...>
Date: 2001-11-28T03:09:38+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26683] Re: Selector Namespaces: A Standard Feature for Smalltalk?

In article <3C02D94B.6050608@mail.com>, James A. Robertson
<jarober@mail.com> wrote:

> Sigh.  Ok.  Here's something that happened in VW back during the 2.5.2 
> and 3.x cycle.  We started including an enhanced inspector.  That 
> enhanced inspector replaced system code here and there, but worked fine 
> - until you wanted to load a commonly used package - the PDP debugger 
> from one of our third parties.  Both packages were useful 
> simultaneously, but both changed many of the same methods in similar 
> ways to suit their own purposes.
> 
> At this point, you could have one or the other (but not both) in the 
> same image.  And guess what?  Versioning does <nothing> for me here.  We 
> had two different outside developers working independently on packages 
> that developers wanted to use <at the same time>.  What people ended up 
> doing was hacking the code (because they had source) to get both to work.
> 
> Had they been binary loadable components with no source, SOL. 
> Versioning doesn't address this issue at all.

My versioning comments were in a completely different subthread.  Here
I was talking about a solution that involves the ability to redefine
the external interface that a package or module has to deal with it in
a polymorphic manner (to keep consistent with OO principles) rather
than introducing the bookkeeping nightmares that are produced with
namespace implementations.  I encourage you to reread my reply from
that perspective.