From kragen@dnaco.net Tue Aug 25 08:32:42 1998 Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 08:32:41 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: fractint@lists.xmission.com Subject: Re: (fractint) Formula inclusion - discussion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1394 Status: O X-Status: On Tue, 25 Aug 1998, Nigel H. J. Long wrote: > This proposal makes good sense to me in its concept. My > main concern is how this will work 'in the wild'. What > happens if two formula fragments accidentally have the same > name? Well, perhaps we could incorporate the author's name into the fragment's name somehow? author Nigel Long { fragment bnts { IF xyz z = z + 1 ELSE z = z * 2 - 1 ENDIF } } formula bob { . . . .; some stuff Nigel Long's bnts } This would avoid most name collisions. And the syntax "[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+'s [a-zA-Z0-9]+" should be clear enough (although someone might think it was supposed to be a comment!) > Every time you have code making a jump to another file you > increase the risk of it making the wrong jump. Is there any > way that the chances of error can be reduced? I cannot see > any simple way of verifying that the fragment read is the > correct one. The above might help a little bit. At least it would keep people from accidentally naming their formulas into each other. C++, Perl, and Ada use namespaces of different sorts to do this. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web