#245 Dealing with name clashes

[Burkhard Schmidt]

During the very first tests with Octave, quite a few name clashes occured, i.e. namespaces (WavePacket source folders whose names begin with +) cause problems because they are interpreted by Octave as function names.

Here are suggestions how to change the names:

• +grid => +dof (degrees of freedom)
• +log => +prt (dealing with print output)
• +exp => +obs (dealing with observables)

There is a bug report in Octave's ticket system from 2019: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=55667. However, we do not wait for this bug to be resolved, as it currently has "normal" priority, so the fix version is unclear.

Rejected alternatives:

• use a super namespace, e.g., "+wp", so that we have wp.log, wp.exp etc. That would, however, be clumsy for the user or, if, e.g. the Matlab user directly adds Sources/+wp to the path, introduce unwanted differences between Octave and Matlab code.