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
