Case-insensitive selectors

Patrick Logan patrickl at servio.gemstone.com
Tue Jan 27 23:52:00 UTC 1998


    From my point of view (I am _not_ one of the "original" smalltalk
    designers) it's just the other way around. In a static language
    you have all the time you need for compiling and linking and doing
    case insensitive comparisons.  Smalltalk, however, does lots of
    things with its selectors.  You can "perform:" them which is in
    basically a lookup of the signature.  In principle, this happens
    every time a message is sent.  I'd say if the method lookup takes
    longer for case-insensitive comparisons this a very good reason to
    stay case insensitive.

I am not advocating for case-insensitity but in response to the
message above, if one were to adopt this policy:

(1) It would seem to me selectors could be replaced by all upper- or
lower-case selectors at compile (i.e. "accept") time. Then all lookups
would be canonical.

(2) Common Lisp and other Lisps are case-insensitive and work fine in
an interactive environment. Its syntax is more suited though since it
can easily use - as a separator rather than _ which requires a <shift>
key.

(3) WithoutASeparatorLike_or-IdGuessMostPeopleWouldStillTypeLikeThis

--
Patrick Logan                 mailto:patrickl at gemstone.com
Voice 503-533-3365            Fax   503-629-8556
Gemstone Systems, Inc         http://www.gemstone.com





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list