nil, true, false in literal arrays

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Feb 18 17:59:24 UTC 2004


"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> Rather surprisingly,
>     #((1 2) (3 4))
> is not even legal syntax in ANSI Smalltalk...


Ack, I wonder why they did it that way?  You can still do this of
course, if I read it correctly:

    #( #(1 2) #(3 4))


The only reason I can see for the ANSI spec is to allow this kind of
usage:

	#( (1 + 2)  (3 + 4))     "generates #(3 7) "

But this is bogus IMHO.  # should be for literals, just like the QUOTE
that it mirrors from Lisp.  Once you are in a quoted form, you should
not have to keep quoting and quoting some more.



-Lex



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