DIP61: Add namespaces to D

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/26/14, 12:27 PM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "Walter Bright"  wrote in message news:ljgt9v$1psm$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
>> Having a pragma to just add mangling doesn't deal with problems like:
>>
>>      namespace N { int foo(); }
>>      namespace M { int foo(); }
>>
>>      foo();  // how to specify which one gets called?
>>
>> I.e. only addressing name mangling does not scale. Need actual scopes,
>> too.
>
> We already have a feature to manage conflicts and organisation in D code
> - modules!  There is no need to add namespaces to do that, and if that's
> really what you want it belongs in a completely different discussion.
>
> The thing we can't (easily) do is mangle C++ namespaces, so a feature
> that only affects mangling is perfect.
>
> i.e. We don't need namespaces in D, because modules cover that.  We only
> need namespace mangling.

Yah, that's why something along the lines of

extern(C++) module facebook.folly;

comes to mind. Following such a module declaration, stuff inside of it 
is considered inside C++ namespace facebook::folly.

The disadvantage of this is that it forces one .di file per namespace, 
whereas in C++ people frequently use different namespaces within the 
same file.


Andrei