Pseudo namespaces

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 3 December 2015 at 21:46:03 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> So maybe explicit namespaces within a module are justified 
> sometimes.

I definitely think that there are times when it's justified, but 
I also think that they should be used sparingly. I think that the 
only time that I've used them is when conceptually I have a 
global object that I'm calling functions on but don't actually 
have an object - e.g. std.datetime.Clock has functions that get 
the time from the system clock, but the system clock is not an 
actual object, and std.windows.registry.Registry groups some 
windows registry-stuff in single, conceptual object. Though while 
conceptually I like having stuff like Clock.currTime, given that 
the monotonic clock stuff is separated into core.time with pretty 
much only the realtime clock stuff being in std.datetime, it 
doesn't work very well to have a single place to query the clock 
like that. So, much as I like it, having std.datetime.Clock was 
probably a mistake.

Certainly, the only time that it makes sense to use a special 
namespace like this is when it makes sense to force the user to 
use the namespace every time they use the symbols in it rather 
than letting the module system differentiate things normally and 
let the user decide what they want to do. And there usually isn't 
a good reason to do that.

- Jonathan M Davis