A few wish list items

Bob Arning arning at charm.net
Wed Nov 20 20:25:55 UTC 2002


On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 21:05:32 +0100 Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
>don't be too harsh with bill this is nice guy. 

I didn't mean to be harsh and apologize if it seemed that way. I guess I just wanted to point out that there is a long history here of messages like "Squeak needs X if it is ever to succeed" and if we took the sum of all those X's, we might end up with Visual Basic or somesuch. I think if Squeak is ever to hit the really big time, the key is to have something so interesting (Croquet, maybe) that the user never even notices there is no underscore character.

>I raised this discussion 
>(as usual;))
>long time ago at least one or two year and I'm still here ;). I think 
>that this is a bit
>stupid for squeak to be not compatible with other
>smalltalk for such a detail. It would be good that the fileout convert 
>_ into :=

A fairly trivial project for anyone who really wanted it.

>
>I did that with the prettyprinter and fileouting all the versions of 
>squeak I could find for
>preparing some versions analysis and yes i can do it but recompiling 
>all the method with prettyprinter.
>
>For me the fact that the fact that there is not a one one 
>correspondance between the glysh and the ascii
>representation is not really good. Then the glyph does not exist in all 
>the fonts size....so I got
>problem with the pictures of my book so I put := everywhere.

Adding the left arrow where missing wouldn't be hard.

>Note that the glyph looks really 70, this is good like that people 
>knows that Squeak is old techonology
>
>Now seriously for me I'm fed up to see good software only running on X, 
>Z or Y Smalltalk dialects. So I like
>when people make the effort to have dialect independent framework 
>(SIXX, YAXO ported to dolphin, GLORP, SWAZOO).
>I think that we should try to simplify their life and you should not 
>tell me that typing one instead of
>two keys make a difference.

For me the big difference is the look, not the number of keys (although I have years of typing _ and wonder how much productive time I would lose if I tried to switch). Colon-equal just has an air of "Gee, we couldn't do any better that two ASCII characters stuck together" about it.

>Now I'm not expert but I still think that this is an important point.

Cheers,
Bob



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