Namespaces

This page is still under construction!

Namespaces are a resource used for organization and encapsulation, used to divide the project into small blocks and provide an aditional layer of safety when it comes to naming conflicts.

A namespace represents a logical group of individual identifiers, organized in a hieraquical order. Identifiers inside namespaces can be refered relatively to a scope or globally, with fully-qualified identifiers.

imagine the following namespace organization:

namespace Std {
    namespace Math {
        struct Graph
        namespace Vector {
            struct Point
        }
    }
}

Inside thr scope of Graph, it is possible to import the Point struct this way:

Graph.a

from Vector import { Point }

However, in another module, the reference must be fully qualified this way:

main.a

from Std.Math.Vector import { Point }

Structuring Namespaced

In Abstract, namespace generation is based entirely on directory structure.

Every namespace is genersted based in a directury. Subdirectories generates neasted namespaces.

Files are ignored and their content is put directly inside the parent namespace.

The concept of this system is designed to allow maximum flexibility with namespace design and organization, also helping with organization and auto-documentation.

Let's take the following project folder as a example:

MyProject/
  |-- Entities/
  |     |-- PhysicsBody.a
  |     '-- ColisionBox.a
  |-- Envs/
  |     |   
  |     |-- Earth.a
  |     |-- Mars.a
  |     '-- Uranus.a
  '-- Math/
        |-- Physics.a
        '-- Constants.a

And knowing that:

• All the following members are marked with the @public attribute;
• PhysicsBody.a, ColisionBox.a, Earth.a, Mars.a and Uranus.a contais all empty structures that inherits the file name;
• Physics.a contains the functions:
  • calculateSpeed(f64 time, f64 force) f64
  • calculateForce(f64 forceX, f64 forceY) f64
• Constants.a contains the constants:
  • const f64 earth_gravity = 9.80
  • const f64 mars_gravity = 3.73
  • const f64 uranus_gravity = 8,87

And compiling the module named as MyProject, The compilation will generate the following global reference table for this module:

KIND:   IDENTIFIER:

root    MyProject
nmsp    MyProject.Entities
struct  MyProject.Entities.PhysicsBody
struct  MyProject.Entities.ColisionBox
nmsp    MyProject.Env
struct  MyProject.Env.Earth
struct  MyProject.Env.Mars
struct  MyProject.Env.Uranus
nmsp    MyProject.Math
func    MyProject.Math.calculateSpeed
func    MyProject.Math.calculateForce
const   MyProject.Math.earth_gravity
const   MyProject.Math.mars_gravity
const   MyProject.Math.uranus_gravity

Naming Limitations

Some file systems, in special unix, allow you to use characters that cannot be used in an identifier. These characters cannot be parsed into identifiers and consequently, cannot be parsed into namespaces.

The namespaces must match the following regular expression: [a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z_].

// TODO