Syntactical extensions vs. pragmas everywhere

Lukas Renggli renggli at gmail.com
Sun Aug 20 09:56:51 UTC 2006


> 1. Primitives, FFI-specs and some other extensions aren't pragmas.
> Treating them like pragmas is ignoring their entire raison d'etre.

I've never said primitives or FFI specs **are** pragmas, I only said
that they are ideally parsed and created using pragmas. It is solely a
compile-time thing, after that you have your compiled method.
Everything else doesn't make sense and you know that.

> 2. Unintelligible code should never be accepted by the compiler and we
> should make sure that syntactical extensions (FFI, Sql and other) are
> clearly marked as such.

I would also like to reserve a couple of selectors for special pragmas
as well as some message selectors in Object. The compiler should
prevent other people to use those selectors as long as my super secret
package is not loaded. These selectors belong to me and nobody should
accidently use or call them. I am the owner of those selector. Keep
away. ;-)

> 5. The <> escape syntax is one of the few extension points in Squeak.
> Loosing it is a shame.

You can still change the parser class for your own classes. This is a
much better extension point than to extend it by patching the parsers
(old parser, new parser, refactoring parser), decompilers,
syntax-highlighters, code competition engines, etc.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch



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