doIfNotNil: -- let's bake the other half
Dan Ingalls
Dan.Ingalls at disney.com
Mon Oct 16 03:57:50 UTC 2000
Joshua Channing Gargus <schwa at cc.gatech.edu> asked...
>What is the difference between doIfNotNil: and ifNotNil:?
... and then answered his own question.
Since it's on the table, though, I want to say that
I actually don't like the name doIfNotNil, in light of a long
discussion several years ago that wound up condemning do:
as defined by singleton objects (with which I basically agree).
We wound up renaming that message to be 'in:' which is so
general as to be meaningless, and nobody uses it as a result.
So when it came to name this method, I couldn't hack 'ifNotNilIn:',
and fell back on this 'do' flavor.
Since the end result is <someBlock> value: <some receiver>,
the patterns should probably be
expr beValueFor: block
expr ifNotNilBeValueFor: block
or
expr evaluate: block
expr ifNotNilEvaluate: block
Has this all been hashed around in other Smalltalks with some reaonable outcome?
- Dan
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