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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