A question from the truly dumb?

[nathan forbes]

On May 27, 2011 11:34 AM, "William Case" <billlinux at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> More and more I have noticed the use of a double colon [::]in coding
> explanations but have not noticed it actually used anywhere.  Does it
> mean anything other than being used as a format.
>
> For example, in a recent repo description:
>
>        perl-DateTime-Format-Natural
>        Description :
>        DateTime::Format::Natural takes a string with a human readable
>        date/time and creates a machine readable one by applying natural
>        parsing logic.
>
> rsync uses the :: in its a man pages.  There it seems to indicate a
> remote machine, but doesn't seem to be required.
>
> Just something I have been meaning to ask for a long time.
>
> --
> Regards Bill
> Fedora 14, Gnome 2.32
> Evo.2.32, Emacs 23.2.1
>
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Well Perl and C++ use it as part of their syntax. In your example, the
module DateTime contains Format which contains Natural. So the full name of
Natural would be DateTime::Format::Natural.

And in C++ it's used to display the scope of namespaces and classes, and so
on. For example if you had something like:

namespace example {
    class Hello {
        static int myMethod();
    }
}

In order to call myMethod() you would do example::Hello::myMethod().
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