The reason I'm pushing for this is because I need it. With my work on Arubic (and other things), I've found myself needing namespaces more and more and more.
One example is that I changed it so [1 2 3] is expanded into (list 1 2 3) rather than creating an anonymous function. This works okay, until I start using Arc code/libraries that rely on the [] syntax, then things break.
Another example is that I want to change it so map, some, all, etc. are renamed into mapfn, somefn, allfn. And then there would be macros that would expand into those functions, like so:
(each x foo
(prn x))
(eachfn prn x)
(map x foo
(+ x 5))
(mapfn car foo)
(some x foo
(some x x
(is x 5))
(somefn whitec foo)
This removes 90%+ of the need for the [] syntax, which means I can then use it for something else, like `list`. But, once again, changing stuff like that breaks things. I could safely change it with proper namespaces.
And sorry, no, using ar's runtimes won't help, because they just create a new copy and then reload arc.arc into it; but the changes I'm describing break arc.arc itself. I need namespace inheritance, or something similar.