[Laszlo-user] [Laszlo-dev] Do datasets really have to be in 3 places at once?

[P T Withington]

On 2006-04-04 16:14 EDT, Oliver Steele wrote:

> On Mar 24, 2006, at 3:41 PM, Adam Wolff wrote:
>> actually, global != canvas in laszlo right now. the promotion of  
>> canvas
>> children to the global namespace was oliver's idea. it makes for  
>> terser
>> syntax, but it's a somewhat obscure feature. you can always use  
>> id. also,
>> if ever wanted to support embedding one laszlo app in another, it  
>> could
>> cause problems. we just need to deprecate it before we change it.
>
> I now think that putting canvas children in the global namespace  
> was a mistake.  It was to make code concise, but it's confusing and  
> there's a better alternative:
>
> OpenLaszlo should adopt the $(name) function that Prototype.js  
> introduced and that is becoming popular is other DHTML frameworks  
> such as JQuery.  (There's an implementation of this function in  
> sandbox/domapi.js.)

$ is a shorthand for looking up names in another namespace, right?   
Did you see my proposal to add (Dylan-like) modules to LZX?  I think  
this could achieve the same benefit (short names without having to  
pollute the global namespace), without the overhead of a function  
call on your references.