| >Paraphrasing, "That's not the name it's just the title and used repeatedly therein" seems to cause more than a little confusion. The phrase "implicit namespace packages" is only used once within the prose of the PEP. But also, the title of the PEP is certainly a separate thing from the name of the feature. Similarly, nobody says that a project following modern packaging standards is using "A build-system independent format for source trees" (which would make it sound as if there were more than one relevant such format), the title of PEP-517. Instead they say that it's a `pyproject.toml`-based project. >The extensive response confirms that the words are awfully overloaded in subtle ways, I agree, basically. This happens all the time in programming, of course. "Package" in the Python ecosystem is perhaps not as bad as, say, `static` in the C++ language; but it's bad and I really wish there were a reasonable way to fix it. On the other hand, "namespace" here isn't meant as Python-specific jargon. It isn't really meant that way anywhere else, either (e.g. people saying "global namespace" should normally really be saying "global scope"). It's the language of computer science, in the abstract (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namespace). So of course it ends up referring to all kinds of things (in multiple categories: data types, objects which are instances of those data types, file systems...) which implement the concept of namespacing. >But, rest assured, I will re-encounter it. Whenever I browse HN I mainly look for posts about Python specifically; so if for example you ever have an Ask HN about it there's a good chance I can help. |