In Practice

So, anyway … the idea is that we should organize our words into hierarchical namespaces. Unfortunately, the idea as stated has a fairly obvious problem, which is that the resulting hierarchical names are long and clunky; fortunately, there are several fairly obvious solutions as well. Suppose I'm writing an essay about consciousness and want to be able to make use of Dennett's particular meanings. The traditional thing to do would be to put a few sentences at the start of the essay to explain, but now I could formalize it, perhaps like so.

import person.Dennett.*;

Or perhaps it should be an #include directive, or a Pascal-like with statement, or a shell path declaration.

set path = language.English, internet.net.urticator,
           person.Dennett

Or, instead of eliminating the prefix entirely, I could define a shorthand within the scope of the essay, like so,

let d = person.Dennett

and then simply refer to d.projection. (I'm still not sure dots are the right delimiters—doesn't “d-projection” sound good? Also, hyphens would allow hyphenation algorithms to insert line breaks.)