[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #55667] Conflict between package namespace and function name

[John W. Eaton]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #55667 (project octave):

Another issue is that "foo" and "foo()" may both be function calls.  Would it
help if, in order to further index a function call, you had to write
foo().index instead of just foo.index?  At least then you would not have to
look up "foo" as a function when evaluating "foo.index".  Or would this not
eliminate all possible conflicts?

>From the point of view of the implementation, I'd be glad to eliminate the
possibility of further indexing function calls because it would greatly
simplify the indexing code in the Octave interpreter.

This change would cause no trouble for people using Octave to run code
developed for Matlab.  But it would probably cause a lot of pain for many
Octave users who have come to rely on this feature.

Oh, I just tried


dir.name    ## works, dir is called with nargout == 1
dir().name  ## fails, because when called this way,
            ## dir is called with nargout == 0 and in
            ## that case it doesn't return a struct.


?!?

Is this behavior really what we want?

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