Squeak readable to most people on this list,
but is it to everyone?
ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Wed Mar 3 20:58:19 UTC 2004
> But even after all that... stick a complicated line of Smalltalk in
> front
> of me, and I freeze in bewilderment for at least a few seconds, and
> then
> if I very carefully step through each token at a time, and write in
> parentheses (if I'm reading a book) or type in parentheses (if I'm
> actually at a Squeak browser) according to the precedence rules: unary
> first, binary second, message third. I find reading Smalltalk to be
> slow
> and painful. I feel like the language turns me into a human parser,
> and I
> feel the Ls and Rs and numbers percolate in my brain.
>
> Repeat same painful process for next line.
I'm trying to understand what is your problem and how to solve it.
Because
I passed from lisp to smalltalk in no time and never got this problems.
In fact when I started Smalltalk I was confused to know where to put ()
and not. So at the beginning to avoid to think and get the stuff down I
put () everywhere.
Then I realised that you only need () if you want to distinguish two
messages having the same
precedence.
x isNil ifTrue:
(x includes: y) ifTrue:
I'm trying to understand how I read code. It seems that I read receiver
and keywords
first as they represent important information and the long messages
then if I need I will focus on the arguments
Compared to lisp this means that I have to find the most important
method ie its
name been split over several words. While in Lisp this is always the
first one.
I hope this can help a bit.
Stef
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