Dan Ingalls has comitted to work with the Squeak community to incorporate a "Top 10 list of features to aid porting from other dialects" into Squeak.
I'm soliciting ideas about what should be on the list and and code/volunteers to implement the feature.
I think we should favor ANSI compatibility, but as stated above, the primary goal is to make porting code from other dialects as painless as possible.
Please send me your responses OFFLINE to pennell@tiac.net and I'll publish a summary on the list.
I'll start with my list:
1. Exceptions VSExceptions and a PPS exceptions package are both available on the net. Comments on applicability? How do we accomadate the two popular models? 2. Finalization Andreas Raab has code (changes VM) for WeakArrays at his site. This is planned for inclusion in Squeak 2.3. What else do we need here? 3. Block Closures There has been lots of discussion about this on the list. Rumor has it that somebody has done most/all of the work. 4. Reserved values in literal arrays (#nil or nil) #(nil true false) should return an array with instances of UndefinedValue, True and False
-david