On Apr 15, 2004, at 12:19 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:

>
> On 15 avr. 04, at 20:57, Avi Bryant wrote:
>
>> So, looking through the code, one thing that strikes me as overly 
>> complicated is all the various modifications around renaming.  Why 
>> are they necessary?  I guess so that you can update the 'environment' 
>> instance variable, but then, it's unnecessary too - why can't the 
>> namespace of a class be a dynamic lookup?
>>
>> Class>>namespace
>>   ^ Namespace namedOrCreateForName: self name
>>
> Hi avi
>
> why not using environment? This is why we started to removed all the 
> hardcoded reference to smalltalk from the kernel and as soon as 
> 3.8alpha starts I'm planning to do a major cure of the image.

Precisely because everything that used to reference Smalltalk now sends 
#environment, I think we should be careful about using it.  For now, 
the #environment of any code *is* Smalltalk; returning anything else is 
effectively lying and is bound to get you into trouble.  I think Göran 
was mostly using it because it's a spare instance variable on Class, 
not because Namespace provides all the semantics an #environment should 
(no doubt he'll correct me if I'm wrong).

Eventually, we may well find a use for that extra indirection, but I 
don't think this is it.