Traits approaching mainstream Squeak

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Wed Aug 31 14:13:27 UTC 2005


O
>>
> Hi folks, first post here in ages and ages.
>
> This is an interesting aspect. I read the traits papers a while  
> back (so I may be rusty), and was fascinated by the work on the  
> collection hierarchy. Let me say that most of my use of squeak does  
> not revolve around programming in the sense of producing a finished  
> piece of software, but rather as a tool to play with and hopefully  
> understand data that crops up in the course of my work. I usually  
> end up with dozens of object explorer windows, several workspaces,  
> chunks of code everywhere, a real mess on screen.
>
> If I feel the need to start creating new classes to represent some  
> of this data, I'm usually just interested in implementing the bare  
> bones to get it functioning. Sometimes I then realize that I'd like  
> my newly created objects to be collection-like or stream-like.  
> Subclassing straight off one of the collection classes isn't the  
> right thing, as it brings with it instance variables to hold the  
> collection's state - I already have the state, what I want is to  
> easily add collection-like behaviour. Richard O'Keefe's enumeration  
> adapter change set from a few years back can be a big help, but  
> it's only a partion solution. In some cases I just end up  
> duplicating as much of the collection protocol as I need.
>
> So I was thinking that traits might help me here to 'flesh out' the  
> collection protocol on top of some bare bones of state. I'll admit  
> that I haven't looked very deeply at this, but have I misunderstood  
> what traits are about?

It is.
You could reuse a Trait-Enumerator traits all over the place without  
duplicating it.


Stef
>
> Cheers,
> Nick
>
> P.S. I realize that what's under discussion right now is including  
> just the kernel of traits, not the actual collection refactoring,  
> and I guess that there would be still be lots of work to do to get  
> the collection traits into squeak.
>
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