More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
More people ought to learn about the programming language concept of namespaces. Generalize from that and you realize that every domain of discourse has its own namespace of words that have different meanings from those same words outside the domain.
My favourite is math which has loads of wonderfully generic-sounding terms such as rational, irrational, radical, real, imaginary, complex, group, ring, field, category, set, operator, element, and unit which all have radically different meanings from the everyday senses of those words.
Yes, but then where would we be without all those endless squabbles about X which are easily solved by pointing out that A::X != B::X?
We’d all be sitting on the back porch, enjoying an ice cold ginger beer at the end of long summer day!
I always thought it was more like overloading, but namespaces are also a good analogy.
I like this.
Kids are already taught to look for “context clues”
Namespacing would require the author explicitly define the namespace.
I would also add versioning as a year/month and localization.