At 11:12 AM 4/22/00 +0000, Lex Spoon wrote:
>Ranjan Bagchi <ranjan.bagchi at frotz.com> wrote:
> > > Actually, you only really have to say:
> > >
> > >               aCollection.do(new BlockLike() {
> > >                     int value(int each) {
> > >                             return each.doSomething();
> > >                     }
> > >               });
> > >
> >
> > Maybe I'm missing something, but why is
> >       aCollection do: [:each | each doSomething]
> > better?
> >
>
>It's one line instead of four, which means blocks are much more
>convenient to use in Smalltakl.  They are also much simpler in
>Smalltalk, because you don't have to put all the surrounding static type
>information.

To make this "real" the Java example actually has to get longer and be 
duplicated. To apply to multiple types we really need

                 aCollection.do(new BlockLikeForIntToInt() {
                         int value(int each) {

and a corresponding one for each pair of types

                 aCollection.do(new BlockLikeForARealClassToSomethingElse() {
                         RealClass value(SomethingElse each) {

If we really only need do: functionality then value can be uniformly void 
and we only need an interface for each class (or a cast inside the 
"block"), but that just brings us to #collect: functionality.


--
Alan Knight [|]			knight at acm.org
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