[Newbies] Question about style

Stephen Davies stephen.l.davies at gmail.com
Wed Aug 30 20:09:34 UTC 2006


Hi listees,

I'm trying to find my Smalltalk accent, if you know what I mean.

In a project I have a class that's a subclass of Dictionary.

I created the following method to create a convenient way of accessing
entries in the dictionary:

doesNotUnderstand: aSelector
	"for unknown selectors, see if we can find an environment variable
and return that"
	^ self at: aSelector asString ifAbsent: [ super doesNotUnderstand: aSelector ]

So my question is whether this is considered good style or not?  It
works quite well (except the doIt in a workspace pops up to say the
selector is unknown).

This sort of thing is done in Ruby often, and I did find some examples
in various classes in my image.

(Actually one example even defined the missing accessor on the fly -
that's really showing off).

Thanks,
Steve


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