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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