Mike Klein wrote:

> It certainly would be nice for the corrector to change
> 
>         iszero -> isZero
> 
> but it would be nicer, still for it to correct:
> 
>         expandCollection -> growCollection
> 
> or
> 
>         emitFourBytes -> emit4Bytes
> 
> sort of a thesaures based corrector.

Yeah, exactly what I wanted all those years:

A Do-What-I-Mean-Not-What-I-Say approach to programming.

The ideal thing would be a syntax checker and corrector which
would generate working programs even if I just rolled my head
on the keyboard. :-)

I'm not saying that those little helpful tricks such as spell
checking, automatic declaration of variables etc. are bad.
They're actually quite useful, and whenever I'm forced to use
VisualAge at a customer project I yearn for the helpfulness
of Smalltalk-80 derived system such as VisualWorks or Squeak.

However, there's a limit. Software that tries to be overly
helpful and intelligent soon gets in the way of getting real
work done. Like the MS Word spelling checker which has bitten me
more than once when it helpfully corrected an 'its' into 'ist'
because it thought I were writing a german text. Giving me hints
is ok, but trying to guess (incorrectly) what I could have meant
is not.

So please, if you think you have a great idea that would make
programming a breeze, just implement it in Squeak, and see whether
it really helps. It's not that difficult. But please stop the
endless discussion...

nuf said

Hans-Martin