> From: Henrik Gedenryd <Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se>
>
> Another, and less important, question is why the TNode classes are  
entirely
> separated from the Node classes of the regular Smalltalk parser,  
instead of
> extending these. Is there a reason that I've missed?

Just came across the paper "Deltatalk: An Empirically and  
Aesthetically Motivated Simplifcation of the Smalltalk-80 Language"  
by Alan Borning (1987).  One of the changes they recommend is a  
simplification of the treating programs as data.

That should also make it easier to put new syntactic "skins" on the  
core language of message passing objects, for scripting, constraints,  
visual interpretations etc.

> (Btw, inlining is among other things the answer to macros in Lisp,  
as asked
> about a while ago. I never saw why one would want macros with a  
separate
> syntax when you could just have inlining of the regular code.)

Not knowing much if anything about LISP macros, the idea of  
eliminating higher order programming constructs at compile-time (only  
when desired!) is also quite attractive, in addition to AOP-like  
stuff.

Marcel