11.5. Name Conflicts

A fundamental invariant of the package system is that within one package any particular name can refer to at most one symbol. A name conflict is said to occur when there is more than one candidate symbol and it is not obvious which one to choose. If the system does not always choose the same way, the read-read consistency rule would be violated. For example, some programs or data might have been read in under a certain mapping of the name to a symbol. If the mapping changes to a different symbol, and subsequently additional programs or data are read, then the two programs will not access the same symbol even though they use the same name. Even if the system did always choose the same way, a name conflict is likely to result in a mapping from names to symbols different from what was expected by the user, causing programs to execute incorrectly. Therefore, any time a name conflict is about to occur, an error is signaled. The user may continue from the error and tell the package system how to resolve the conflict.

It may be that the same symbol is accessible to a package through more than one path. For example, the symbol might be an external symbol of more than one used package, or the symbol might be directly present in a package and also inherited from another package. In such cases there is no name conflict. The same identical symbol cannot conflict with itself. Name conflicts occur only between distinct symbols with the same name.

The creator of a package can tell the system in advance how to resolve a name conflict through the use of shadowing. Every package has a list of shadowing symbols. A shadowing symbol takes precedence over any other symbol of the same name that would otherwise be accessible to the package. A name conflict involving a shadowing symbol is always resolved in favor of the shadowing symbol, without signaling an error (except for one instance involving import described below). The functions shadow and shadowing-import may be used to declare shadowing symbols.

Name conflicts are detected when they become possible, that is, when the package structure is altered. There is no need to check for name conflicts during every name lookup.

The functions use-package, import, and export check for name conflicts. use-package makes the external symbols of the package being used accessible to the using package; each of these symbols is checked for name conflicts with the symbols already accessible. import adds a single symbol to the internals of a package, checking for a name conflict with an existing symbol either present in the package or accessible to it. import signals a name conflict error even if the conflict is with a shadowing symbol, the rationale being that the user has given two explicit and inconsistent directives. export makes a single symbol accessible to all the packages that use the package from which the symbol is exported. All of these packages are checked for name conflicts: (exportsp) does (find-symbol (symbol-names)q) for each package q in (package-used-by-listp). Note that in the usual case of an export during the initial definition of a package, the result of package-used-by-list will be nil and the name-conflict checking will take negligible time.

The function intern, which is the one used most frequently by the Lisp reader for looking up names of symbols, does not need to do any name-conflict checking, because it never creates a new symbol if there is already an accessible symbol with the name given.

shadow and shadowing-import never signal a name-conflict error because the user, by calling these functions, has specified how any possible conflict is to be resolved. shadow does name-conflict checking to the extent that it checks whether a distinct existing symbol with the specified name is accessible and, if so, whether it is directly present in the package or inherited. In the latter case, a new symbol is created to shadow it. shadowing-import does name-conflict checking to the extent that it checks whether a distinct existing symbol with the same name is accessible; if so, it is shadowed by the new symbol, which implies that it must be uninterned if it was directly present in the package.

unuse-package, unexport, and unintern (when the symbol being uninterned is not a shadowing symbol) do not need to do any name-conflict checking because they only remove symbols from a package; they do not make any new symbols accessible.

Giving a shadowing symbol to unintern can uncover a name conflict that had previously been resolved by the shadowing. If package A uses packages B and C, A contains a shadowing symbol x, and B and C each contain external symbols named x, then removing the shadowing symbol x from A will reveal a name conflict between b:x and c:x if those two symbols are distinct. In this case unintern will signal an error.

Aborting from a name-conflict error leaves the original symbol accessible. Package functions always signal name-conflict errors before making any change to the package structure. When multiple changes are to be made, however, for example when export is given a list of symbols, it is permissible for the implementation to process each change separately, so that aborting from a name conflict caused by the second symbol in the list will not unexport the first symbol in the list. However, aborting from a name-conflict error caused by export of a single symbol will not leave that symbol accessible to some packages and inaccessible to others; with respect to each symbol processed, export behaves as if it were an atomic operation.

Continuing from a name-conflict error should offer the user a chance to resolve the name conflict in favor of either of the candidates. The package structure should be altered to reflect the resolution of the name conflict, via shadowing-import, unintern, or unexport.

A name conflict in use-package between a symbol directly present in the using package and an external symbol of the used package may be resolved in favor of the first symbol by making it a shadowing symbol, or in favor of the second symbol by uninterning the first symbol from the using package. The latter resolution is dangerous if the symbol to be uninterned is an external symbol of the using package, since it will cease to be an external symbol.

A name conflict in use-package between two external symbols inherited by the using package from other packages may be resolved in favor of either symbol by importing it into the using package and making it a shadowing symbol.

A name conflict in export between the symbol being exported and a symbol already present in a package that would inherit the newly exported symbol may be resolved in favor of the exported symbol by uninterning the other one, or in favor of the already-present symbol by making it a shadowing symbol.

A name conflict in export or unintern due to a package inheriting two distinct symbols with the same name from two other packages may be resolved in favor of either symbol by importing it into the using package and making it a shadowing symbol, just as with use-package.

A name conflict in import between the symbol being imported and a symbol inherited from some other package may be resolved in favor of the symbol being imported by making it a shadowing symbol, or in favor of the symbol already accessible by not doing the import. A name conflict in import with a symbol already present in the package may be resolved by uninterning that symbol, or by not doing the import.

Good user-interface style dictates that use-package and export, which can cause many name conflicts simultaneously, first check for all of the name conflicts before presenting any of them to the user. The user may then choose to resolve all of them wholesale or to resolve each of them individually, the latter requiring a lot of interaction but permitting different conflicts to be resolved different ways.

Implementations may offer other ways of resolving name conflicts. For instance, if the symbols that conflict are not being used as objects but only as names for functions, it may be possible to ``merge’’ the two symbols by putting the function definition onto both symbols. References to either symbol for purposes of calling a function would be equivalent. A similar merging operation can be done for variable values and for things stored on the property list. In Lisp Machine Lisp, for example, one can also forward the value, function, and property cells so that future changes to either symbol will propagate to the other one. Some other implementations are able to do this with value cells but not with property lists. Only the user can know whether this way of resolving a name conflict is adequate, because it will work only if the use of two non-eq symbols with the same name will not prevent the correct operation of the program. The value of offering symbol merging as a way of resolving name conflicts is that it can avoid the need to throw away the whole Lisp world, correct the package-definition forms that caused the error, and start over from scratch.

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