Method names
Vassili Bykov
vassili at objectpeople.com
Mon Nov 2 14:48:55 UTC 1998
At 01:37 PM 11/2/98 +0800, Matthew McDonald <mafm at cs.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>It looks like the main difficulty would be that the resulting language
>couldn't be parsed without extra information - you'd need to know
>whether or not there was a message called #next:bits to decide whether
>or not "aBitStream next: 40 bits" meant ((aBitStream next: 40) bits).
[Incidentally, that would be (aBitStream next: (40 bits))]
Knowing what method selectors exist in the image would not be enough. If
there existed #next:bits, #next:, and #bits, you would not be able to tell
which interpretation of "<expr1> next: <expr2> bits" was the proper one
without knowing (and you can't) the types of the expression results. What's
even worse, in a dynamic environment where selectors come and go, adding or
removing a selector would mean potentially changing the parse tree of some
of the already compiled methods.
--Vassili
--
Vassili Bykov vassili at objectpeople.com
The Object People http://www.objectpeople.com
+1(613)225-8812
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
-- Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming
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