Why we should remove {} from Squeak

Allen Wirfs-Brock Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com
Wed Oct 3 16:32:09 UTC 2001


Gemstone was generally viewed as a specialized dialect rather than one of 
the "mainstream" implementations. My recollection is that their 
representative did not advocate for this feature.

On a related issue, IBM Smalltalk had a feature (I think the syntax was 
##(<statement-list>)) that created a literal array that was initialized 
from a set of Smalltalk statements that were evaluated at compile 
time(!!!!).  That feature was soundly rejected because of the object level 
coupling it created between the development and deployment environments.

Allen

At 07:48 PM 10/2/2001 -0700, John Dougan wrote:
>At 03:17 PM 02/10/01, you wrote:
>
>>The ANSI discussions were in the context of adding {} as a new feature as 
>>none to the commercial Smalltalk implementations supported it.
>
>Not quite true. Gemstone/S supports this feature with a different syntax:
>#[ <expr1> , <expr2> , ... ]  == { <expr1> . <expr2> .  ...}
>Was Gemstone not represented on the committee?
>
>--john
>
>
>--
>John Dougan
>jdougan at acm.org
>
>





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