> The problem is independent of duplication. Say you have a method that says
>
> foo
> 	| b |
> 	b := 'abc'.
> 	Transcript space; show: b.
> 	b at: 2 put: $d
>
> What prints the second time you send #foo? Because the literal (copied or
> not) is stored with the compiled method and not the activation, the second
> time aroud b is 'adc' even though it's right after the assignment
> of 'abc'.

Yuck!  I assume from what you say below that this problem wouldn't occur
with VisualWorks.  Is that true?

> For VisualWorks, we got rid of the sharing but not the mutability.

This seems like the best solution to me.  I can't imagine that sharing is
useful very often.  How often are there really identical string or array
literals in the same method?  And in general a literal is going to be small,
since you have to type it in, so the memory savings by sharing are also
small.  The simplest method is to just create a new object every time a
literal is encountered.  If a programmer wants them to be shared, they can
just do

a := 'hello'.
b := a.
c := a.

Adam