On Tue, 23 Mar 1999 20:38:06 +0100 Stefan Matthias Aust <sma at mail.netsurf.de> wrote: 
>Actually, I'm surpised that everybody seems to dislike the idea.

Stefan,

I had a reaction not unsimilar to others who responded to your suggestion, but I wanted to spend some time to try to understand why it bothered me so. Part of my reaction was of the "If it aint broke, don't fix it" variety. This has been expressed by others who championed the simplicity of Smalltalk syntax. Smalltalk is _so_ easy to read at the syntactic level that one can proceed to the semantic level in a manner of seconds in most cases.

But more than the simple purist's objection, I wondered what practical effect it would have. While you could, and still can, make such changes to your image and distribute those changes to others who appreciate the clarity you seek, what happens when, and if, it enters the mainstream? What would be the next change proposed? Would it be admitted as well?

Most of us have programmed in a fair number of languages and one common aspect, I suppose, is the ability to recognize what the language is when glancing at a bit of code. I think what bothered me the most was that some day I might be browsing code in Squeak and come across a method where I couldn't immediately identify the dialect or even the language (I was beginning to think your extensions looked a lot like Object Pascal). The time spent to stop and puzzle out what messages are being sent to what objects is time lost when I what I really need to do is to understand what those messages mean. The current simple and consistent syntax enables me to put my energies where they are most needed.

I think it would be more palatable to accept the inclusion of totally different languages in the Squeak environment rather than to have a slow creep of Smalltalk syntax. At least one would have a clear signal that it was time to switch gears (and possibly dig out the manual). I wonder if your changes might meet with greater approval if they were a part of something larger and distinctly different that addressed some set of problems better than the standard Smalltalk.

Cheers,
Bob