On Sunday, July 21, 2002, at 06:54  Uhr, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Marcel, David,
>
>>> It is quite easy to imagine
>>
>> Imagination is one thing...experience another.  Somehow, this
>> reminds me of all the awful things that people (strongly) advocating
>> mandatory static+manifest typing keep telling Smalltalkers will
>> happen, which Smalltalkers just don't seem to see happening.
>> Show me some evidence that this actually *does* happen in
>> real life
>
> That was exactly the question I raised to begin with. Nevin's paper
> quotes a few problems that don't apply to Smalltalk (like auto-coercing
> nil into different atomic types on varying platforms) and I was really
> wondering how much of a problem the message eating behavior can cause in
> practice. I guess there are always a lot of theoretical arguments that
> can be made here (similarly to the issue of static typing) and only time
> and experience can tell what works and what doesn't.

Exactly!  That was the point I was trying to get across:  despite all 
the horrible things that can happen in theory, it seems to have worked 
remarkably well in practice, certainly for me and also for many others.

Of course, one has to take Nevin's point into account:  there may very 
well be more problems if you mix with code that doesn't expect a 
message-eating nil.

Marcel

--
Marcel Weiher				Metaobject Software Technologies
marcel at metaobject.com		www.metaobject.com
Metaprogramming for the Graphic Arts.   HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.