New SqueakMap

Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki at squeakland.org
Wed Apr 12 17:40:33 UTC 2006


  Martin,

> >   For a first time Squeaker, they would want to write out a string and
> > read it back from a file (they wouldn't know the difference of
> > ByteString and WideString, or even the line end problem).  Otherwise,
> > there will be strings that *cannot* write out to a file.  For such
> > user, putting UTF-8 conversion (no matter what platform he is on) by
> > default would help.
> > 
> 
> Yoshiki,
> 
> I think the question is whether the first time Squeaker would want to 
> write out a String or something else or read something else in. The 
> general Squeak user doesn't want to write out anything and the 
> programmer is probably astonished about (and bitten by) the text 
> default, at least I was.

  I should've phrased differently.  "For a novice Squeak programmer
who is trying to deal with files first time" is closer what I meant.

  Yes, when we talk about the "least surprise principle", we always
have to be careful about "whose surprise?" question.  What would you
suggest?

> About another question of this thread: StandardFileStream is faster than 
> MultiByteFileStream for binary operations (25%-30% for a simple loop 
> with #next). So IMHO we should not "get rid of it".

  The better design would be to separate the responsibility, which
Andreas mentioned.  I'm pretty sure that we are not going to get rid
of StandardFileStream just for the sake of simplicity.

  On the other hand, I would say that reading a byte by a byte is not
a common practice and 30% improvement doesn't necessary warrant having
special cases.

-- Yoshiki



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