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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