Sometimes, the VisualWorks namespace paradigm leaves a lot to be desired. For one - it promotes the idea that everything should be in a namespace that is publicly declared. That pretty much means installing code in a fake namespace doesn't work so well without a great deal of trickery.

To combat this, Smalltalk/X implemented namespaces simply as classes - you put a class inside another class, the parent class can reference the child class but the child class must fully qualify the parent class. The same approach is employed in Newspeak too.

Travis has said to me many times how much he likes this model and, to be honest, I think the model has some interesting merits too - though I'm not sure I'd want to throw away the existing namespace mechanism completely.

Today I wondered just how hard it would be to make classes act as namespaces in VisualWorks using the existing mechanism. As it turns out, it was pretty easy. ClassNamespaces (and ClassNamespaces-tests) are now in public store. There may be bugs but it seems to be working for me. The tests aren't unit tests, they're classes inside classes with various class lookups to make sure the scoping works the way I expect it would work.

Give this a go if you're interested and post your feedback as comments here or just email me directly. If you think this is the sort of thing that belongs in the base, please say so as well.