I don't object using fully qualified symbols to distinguish packages for the benefits of human readers. I care about human readers as much as you, don't worry a

I don't object using fully qualified symbols to distinguish packages for the benefits of human readers. I care about human readers as much as you, don't worry about that. I am not talking about different symbols which happen to share the same name (in different packages), but about the different meanings of a single symbol in different contexts. In the example of (CL:LIST LIST), I said that a reader would infer that both symbols are different, whereas you are saying that we should prefix them even if they are, in fact, the same symbol. I am using the CL definition of namespace, by the way: namespace n. 1. bindings whose denotations are restricted to a particular kind. ``The bindings of names to tags is the tag namespace.'' 2. any mapping whose domain is a set of names. ``A package defines a namespace.'' That means that even though packages define namespaces, not all namespaces are tied to packages. In particular, you cannot distinguish the function namespace from the value namespace with a package prefix. That's why in Lisp I can clear any confusion by writing either LIST or #'LIST, and that's why I like FUNCALL. Within standard evaluation rules (LIST X) does not use the value of a variable named LIST. In all your comments above you use words which have both verb and noun meanings, but you did not need to explain it to me. Did I seem confused? Did I say: "Hey, you wrote 'to shadow ...' but that's wrong, a 'shadow' is the thing I see on the ground when its sunny". What words look like is very distinct from their "role" in a sentence, and this is so much a natural thing to do for humans that most mainstream programming languages enable this. static void foo (int foo) { System.out.println(foo); } So, in the extreme case of: (defmethod foo ((foo foo)) (funcall foo)) ... how would you disambiguate things using package prefixes? (defmethod fun:foo ((var:foo class:foo)) (funcall var:foo)) Anybody who introduces made-up packages like this in CL to "clean-up the mess" will lose the right to commit code ;-) > Also adding I was using the term `shadowing` somewhat sloppily. Names are important enough that anytime one is being used in more than one way we should take great precaution. Yeah, right. I am talking about lisp:namespaces instead of clojure:namespaces. But I can "name things" and "have a name" without having to distinguish both usages.