About retryCoerce and generality in Squeak

Helge Horch Helge.Horch at t-online.de
Mon Sep 20 07:54:10 UTC 2004


On 19.09.2004, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>I wanted to show the coercion mechanism in 
>smalltalk (I read part of it in the 
>InsideSmalltalk volume one book).
>In  VW it is based on generality and retryCoerce:
>
>In Squeak I could not find generality and 
>related. I only found adaptToInteger and 
>other....

Yup, we're different :-). This goes way back to 
updates 386/387, see 
<http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-November/010049.html> 
for Dan's original message with explanations.

>Does someone knows if this is equivalent in terms of extensibility?

Haven't used both, but ours is certainly adapted 
(sic) to new "types" easily. At the time, I based 
the Units port arithmetic on it. IIRC, it was 
little work.

HTH,
Helge



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