Namespacing

[jscriptcoder]

Hi there,

Another idea I have in mind, implementing some namespacing system, using maybe "namespace" or "package" word, something like

CoffeeScript:

namespace com.package.subpackage

JavaScript output:

var __namespace = function (strns) {
    var root, ns, len, _i;
    if (typeof strns === 'string') {
        root = window;
        ns = strns.split('.');
        len = ns.length;
        for (_i = 0; _i < len; _i++) {
            root = root[ns[_i]] = root[ns[_i]] || {};
        }
    }
};

__namespace('com.package.subpackage');

Makes sense ?

Thanks

Fran

[jashkenas]

Thanks for the idea, but JavaScript already has nice namespaces in the form of object literals, and there's no need to introduce special Java-esque syntax for it. In addition, the golden rule of CoffeeScript is "no special functions" ... so the proposed implementation wouldn't pass muster.

[jscriptcoder]

I just though it might be a good feature if CoffeeScript did that for you, instead of using the function above to create namespaces or manually doing something like:

var com = com || {};
com.package = com.package || {};
com.package.subpackage = com.package.subpackage || {};

which is annoying, we could use that helper, "__namespace" (borrowed from YUI), in the same way as "__extends" helper is being used to achieve inheritance. But if no special functions is one of the golden rules of CoffeeScript, fair enough ;-)

Thanks.

[StanAngeloff]

Bake it yourself: https://gist.github.com/731816

namespace 'com.package.subpackage', (exports) ->
  exports.fn = ->