CoCoA » CoCoA-5

John Abbott wrote:

Several packages refer to non exported functions by calling them with the prefix $..

Apparently this is no longer necessary in CoCoA-5: I tried removing the prefix from one package, and it continued to work normally. However, it may be helpful for future maintainers to see the prefix $. so that they know it refers to a locally defined (undocumented!?!) function.

Is it really a feature of CoCoA-5 that the prefix is unnecessary? Perhaps we could disable the feature or offer a command line option to enable/diable it?

In CoCoA-4 it was necessary to have $. and so it was a great pain to convert user files of functions into packages, moreover "exported" functions had to be declared in "coclib.cpkg". We wanted to make it easy to convert any CoCoA-5 code into a package, so we decided to get rid of the necessity of $. and introduced the export key.

JAA notes that the dollar-dot prefix (or perhaps also the full prefix?) is necessary for package local variables.

Since we are hoping that packages will play an ever minor role, it is probably not worth spending time to fiddle with details like this.

Should I "close" or even "reject" this issue?

I'm not realy sure what the difference between "reject" and "close" is.
In this case I prefer to "close" (perhaps because the original issue was rather vague, along the line of "dicuss this").

Closing