Syntactic preferences: should we remove the prepending spm_?

[johmedr]

This is a discussion to follow-up on a problem highlighted first in Issue #25: from spm import * is not a recommended syntax. However, import spm leads to the pedantic spm.spm_ notation for all spm functions. Should we simply remove the prepending spm_ when wrapping the code?

[jbonaiuto]

I vote yes. For a user it's weird and annoying to prepend the package name to every function. They can do something like
from spm import eeg_load as spm_eeg_load
if they need the disambiguation

[balbasty]

It sounds appealing, but what do we do with code that's in sub directories? Do we call spm.matlabbatch.cfg_entry?
And what about the toolbox code that's usualy brought in the main namespace? Should I call spm.shoot3d or spm.toolbox.Shoot.spm_shoot3d? Or even uglier spm.toolbox.DARTEL.spm_dartel_norm.

I am happy with making the namespace nicer, but only if we can find a robust set of rules to decide which prefixes are kept in the name and which are replaced by a namespace.

[johmedr]

Indeed, that can get really messy really quickly. I know there was a will to clear up namespaces in spm main repo, such that everything is kept clear and organised. We can also decide to wait on that? we can also omit namespaces for now (we now that there is no conflicting names because of the way matlab works).