On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Göran Krampe goran@krampe.se wrote:
...so while not exactly Smalltalk code that can be fed to the regular Compiler it would still be parsed and executed like a series of #perform: to a builder object. It would be fast (modulo speed of #perform:), secure (you can't run arbitrary code) and avoids limits of Compiler.
With a little care, a format could be both normal Smalltalk code AND something that would be easy to parse. For example, it could have only keyword messages and strings, perhaps boolean literals and integers, but no binary messages, assignment, or array literals. Thus, you could first implement a parser by just reading in the string and evaluating it, and then you could build a real parser. This would make it easy to develop test-first, since you can focus first on writing out the objects, and use the trivial way of reading them in to test it.
-Ralph