Case-insensitive selectors
Jon M. DeLaurier
jdelaurier at vanisle.net
Wed Jan 28 21:55:41 UTC 1998
I would rather be a
PersonWhoTypesSelectorsLikeThis:
than a
PERSONWHOTYPESSELECTORSLIKETHIS:
Jon
------------------------------------------
>Subject: Case-insensitive selectors
>Sent: 27/01/1998 15:52
>Received: 28/01/1998 11:07
>From: Patrick Logan, patrickl at servio.gemstone.com
>Reply-To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
>To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
>
>
> 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
>
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