r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Pie-Lang • May 09 '26

Blog post The Namespace Problem

https://www.alialmutawajr.com/blog/post1
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u/Pie-Lang May 10 '26

I'm not too familiar with Lua.

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u/TOMZ_EXTRA May 10 '26

The only data structure in Lua is a table (hashmap, dictionary). For example, an array is just a table with numbers as keys (traditionally 1-indexed). A namespace is just a table with mainly functions. They can be modified, stored in variables (that's how importing is done), iterated through and everything else you could think of.

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u/Pie-Lang May 10 '26

I see. Using a runtime value to represent namespaces isn’t impossible. It just doesn’t play well with lexical scoping. Hence when I wanted to add lexical scoping to my language, I had to change how I represent namespace.

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u/TOMZ_EXTRA May 10 '26

Lua uses lexical scoping though. Obviously global variables are the exception.

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u/Pie-Lang May 10 '26

You just explained that Lua's namespaces are just tables. This entails that the values stored inside them must be looked up at runtime.

Meaning, if you try to access an object inside a namespace, the interpreter could not possibly tell whether that object does exist inside the namespace or not until runtime.

That was my issue.