import concerns (was Re: Historical language survey)

[Walter Bright]

Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> I personally don't like it myself, first of all it is not a natural word for
> me (I don't have English as my mother tongue, might very well be the
> reason), but my understanding of the word make it very unlikely to me that
> it actually _do_ something, it should just give something a different name.
> Using it for anything else (pulling something from one namespace to
> another, for instance when subclassing), or for making namespaces, is to me
> the most unintuitive thing I've ever come across in a programming language
> (I don't count COBOL here ...). I actually hate it :)

It does give something a different name, in the current namespace. You 
could think of it like what Python calls it: binding a name from another 
namespace into the local symbol table.

Or you could think of it like a 'reference' variable, such as inout 
function parameters.