23 Mar
1999
23 Mar
'99
8:38 p.m.
Brian Wilkerson once developed an interesting proposal for extending the message pattern with optional keywords and a variable numbers of repeated keywords. You can find his proposal at http://www.smalltalksystems.com/publications/varargs.pdf
Some people seem to like this concept and other seem to not. As far as I know nobody has every actually tried to implement it but I think both parts of his proposal would be relatively easy to implement in Squeak primarily with a little compiler hacking. Note that while he proposes a virtual machine change to support the variable args I believe that it could be prototyped strictly using #doesNotUnderstand:
Allen_Wirfs-Brock@Instantiations.com