Re: Proposal to change naming format to allow package-prefix/function-name

[Richard Stallman]

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In Common Lisp, name spaces do not behave cleanly.  The reason is that
a symbol's name space has to be recognized when it is read, for the
sake of symbols compared with eq.  This is too early to make good choices.

To get clean behavior for name spaces, it is necessary to be able to
choose a symbol's name space based on the execution context when code
is run.  Some languages do that, and name spaces are simple and clear
in those languages.

Unless we can find a way to do this right in Lisp -- and I don't see
how that could be -- name spaces will offer no advantage over name
prefixes that are part of the name.

I have no strong opinions about using / or : in symbol names.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)