On 9/19/07, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:

On Sep 18, 2007, at 18:09 , Jason Johnson wrote:

> Oh no, are people really so strongly for ::?

I'm rather strongly against ".". And not only because the dot is
already too overloaded in Smalltalk.

Dot-notation is becoming ubiquitous in "pop CS" to the point where
people don't even admit there are alternatives. In one German state
teaching "dot notation" to kids is made mandatory by the school
administration, ruling out the use of Smalltalk as a teaching
language. I kid you not.

Having it creep into Squeak would make this individual sad. If this
means anything to anybody ;)

I'm sorry to hear that. If it gets in, I might send you a beer to cheer you up.

Could you explain how the dot is overloaded in Smalltalk? Currently I'm only aware that it's used for ending statements.

The fact that the dot notation (in the context of Namespaces, I assume) is popular is quite important. If it comes only with a small grammatic and typographic cost, then in my opinion it's a good idea to keep things consistent across languages.

What do other Smalltalks use? Could somebody knowledgable give me a quick run-down?

Other programming languages:
Python - '.'
Java - '.'
C++ - '::'
C# - '.'
Erlang - ':'
Haskell - '.' (note 1)

Not a programming language
XML - ':' (?)
Filesystems - '/', '\', ':'.

(1) http://bardolph.ling.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/haskell98-report/hier.pdf.gz