[GAP Forum] Packages and global functions

[Yevgen Muntyan]

Dear GAP people,

We are writing a package which deals with automata groups
(rooted tree automorphisms), and I just tried what happens
if I load 'automata' package (the official one). There are name
clashes, and all of them are caused by the fact that the automata
package doesn't use operations, only global functions.

So I have couple of questions.

Should packages use operations as much as possible? It sounds
sensible since methods can be overridden as one wishes, and
operations with the same name can be declared for different
types safely. It doesn't solve the problem with category names
of course, but that's easier to deal with - a category with obscure
name is fine as long as user doesn't have to type it in (unlike
actual methods which are going to be used by a user).

And related to this is real question, about namespaces. Are there
some plans to implement something like that in GAP? Some
method to separate names in a package would be awesome.
At the moment there are about million global names, and you
never know what your package will conflict with.

Thank you,
Yevgen