Colin Putney wrote:
On May 16, 2006, at 4:38 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:
Yes I know I thought about it too but I never liked the idea that sending a message would create a method or a class. May be I'm too old fashioned :)
Is there another way to do it?
Of course not - under the hood everything in Smalltalk is done by sending messages to objects. IMO the question is whether the source code snippet for defining a class should have the syntactic form of a message send, or something else. Personally, I like it as it is, but we already have a discrepancy in the browser (and in file-outs): When we define methods, we don't write SomeClass compile: 'method source' classified: 'protocol' because that would be pretty clumsy.
Now for class definitions, I don't see how all the alternative approaches of defining classes give a real advantage over the traditional message send expression. VisualWorks introduced a new set of selectors to accomodate namespaces, but it's still a valid expression.
Cheers, Hans-Martin