[Newbies] Re: A do with ONLY index? (plus,. a style question)

[Blake]

On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:58:32 -0800, Klaus D. Witzel  
<klaus.witzel at cobss.com> wrote:

> Sure. Evaluate "Object halt; new" with doIt and then in the debugger, in  
> the DoIt method line push the buttons "Through" then "Into".

Aha.

Huh.

Why doesn't this:

^ self basicNew initialize

cause a DNU? Object doesn't have an "initialize" method.

> But yes we care :) The default initializer is Object>>#initialize, an  
> empty method with is executed at primitive speed (it just returns self).  
> Before that, #basicNew (the primitive) has already initialized the new  
> instance with all nil's (or zeros, depending on the class' format spec).  
>  From the ~ 2887 classes in my Squeak-dev image, only some 928 implement  
> initialize (even less when subtracting all the class side implementors).
>
> So yes, it's quite common behavior to let the user set something  
> actually useful.

I wasn't clear. I'm accustomed to creating "reasonable defaults" for  
instances. In a lot of cases, this has struck me as dumb, since there are  
no reasonable defaults. I thought I saw the same thing going on in Squeak  
but that doesn't seem to be the case.