Hi all,

After reading all the posts on this topic with interest, here what's 
beginning to become clear to me. Although there would be some benefit 
in having a standard pattern for initialization, it wouldn't be great 
enough to justify the chaos of migrating to it.

Making this change would create an *enormous* number of bugs. A lot of 
them would be easy to find and fix, sure. Others will be more subtle. 
And this is pretty much an "all or nothing" change. Unlike, say, the 
network rewrite, you can't have both mechanisms in place at the same 
time and gradually move things over.

During the transition period, we'd have a lot of really ugly code 
written by people who want to have their package work in both the old 
system and the new system. Remember all the little work-arounds to 
avoid deprecation warnings? This will be worse:

new
	^ self systemSendsInitialize
			ifTrue: [super new]
			ifFalse: [super new initialize]

<shudder>

Let's not go there.

Colin