make (symbol foo "bar") work with foo being a namespace

Question

I've run across the need to do (symbol ns "bar") a few times, and the existing approach (symbol (name (ns-name ns)) "bar") just doesn't seem like it ought to be the only way to do the job. Includes a patch to make this work, by adding a new arity to Symbol.intern().

Some discussion on this idea, here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/clojure/n25aZ5HA7hc/discussion

Answer 1

Comment made by: stu

I am not sure I like this, but I would like a rethink of names and namespaces. Doing a lot of cross language work, it would be great to have protocols for "I have a name" and for "I have a namespace".

With such protocols in place, it would also be possible to separately consider implementing symbol et al in terms of them.

Answer 2

Comment made by: hiredman

Named being a protocol or an interface seems orthogonal to being able to create a symbol qualified with a namespace when you have a namespace in hand.

I don't think the patch goes far enough, not only should (symbol ns "foo") be supported, but also (symbol ns 'foo), given that (symbol 'foo) works and (symbol "foo") works, (symbol 'bar 'foo) should also work, but doesn't.

if Named is a protocol, and if you extend it to String, and if you make the symbol function create symbols from one or two Named things you still end up having to do (symbol (ns-name ns) 'foo) or (symbol (ns-name ns) "foo")

Answer 3

Comment made by: joegallo

Stuart, I'm not opposed to the idea of separate protocols for Named and Namespaced. Where should I go about creating a proposal to create those protocols and get them into clojure? I'm interested in doing the leg-work, or being a part of it. But as an outsider, I don't know what to do next -- creating a ticket in Jira exhausted my knowledge of the process.

Answer 4

Comment made by: franks

The same enhancement that joe suggests for symbol, would also apply to keyword.

See: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/222e4abc16df8b20

Probably same/similar solution applies to both issues.

-FrankS.

Answer 5

Comment made by: ambrosebs

I did vote on this, but I retracted my vote. Strings for both arguments is clearly a correct implementation to me, but combinations of symbols/namespaces/named/namespaced things are not so clear.

Answer 6

Reference: https://clojure.atlassian.net/browse/CLJ-891 (reported by joegallo)