Better Namespaces

An interesting problem I’ve encountered many times in Java is that of conflicting names.  For example,  suppose I have the following code:

import wyil.lang.*;
import wyil.lang.Type.*;

...

public static Type T_Bool = new Type.Bool();

This is all well and good.  The problem arises when I want to import another class called Type from some package.  Suppose the wyjc.lang package contains a class called Type:

import wyil.lang.*;
import wyil.lang.Type.*;
import wyjc.lang.*;

...

public static Type T_Bool = new Type.Bool();
public static wyjc.lang.Type WYJC_BOOL = new wyjc.lang.Type.Bool();

This is not really a problem — it’s just annoying.  I now have to provide full package information whenever I want to work with one of the Type classes.

What would be really great is to have a more flexible import statement, like Python.  For example:

import wyil.lang.*;
import wyil.lang.Type.*;
import wyjc.lang.Type as wyjcType;

...

public static Type T_Bool = new Type.Bool();
public static wyjcType WYJC_BOOL = new wyjcType.Bool();

This would be a nice and elegant way to resolve this problem of namespaces.  So, I think I’ll put something like this in Whiley …

And, it looks like others are complaining as well …  see here and here.