author initials / truncation and round off
nicolas cellier
ncellier at ifrance.com
Sun Feb 5 01:00:17 UTC 2006
Hello,
I come from VisualWorks world and am new to squeak environment.
I spent a lot of time searching where i could change author initials that were
asked to me the first time i fed the browser, untill i found the item in Help
menu.
Would not the changes menu just above be a more logical place ?
By the way, is this the right place for this kind of minor suggestion ?
I have some more general questions that will be illustrated using truncation
and round off example.
I noticed that the #roundTo: was implemented only in Number Collection and
Duration, while #truncateTo: was also in Point and Rectangle.
#roundUpTo: is only in Number (though ceiling is defined in Number Collection
and Duration).
#roundDownTo: is nowhere at all, probably because no one ever used it.
Complex has no mean to rounding.
Who makes decisions about where to implement such general purpose messages ?
Should Squeak search a better uniformity of library at expense of a bigger
image or reduce the kernel only to messages that are used ? (but then lot of
people would implement the same extension, me first).
If the response is uniformity, i can provide code for completing that as soon
as i find how to publish... Are you interested ?
I have already published a SYSEXT-rounding in VW Cincom public repository,
because it will be a prereq of some other packages.
In VW, I had chosen the names #ceilingTo: and #floorTo:, because i found that
it had a certain symmetry with the way other messages were formed : truncated
-> truncateTo:, rounded -> roundTo:, ceiling -> ...
But maybe ceilingTo: is bad english compared to roundUpTo: , a french
shouldn't decide that...
My question is who decides ? Shouldn't be an agreement found with other
dialect makers ? is it ANSI stuff ? Or maybe no use to discuss so long each
and every message, one decides and the others follow ? An intermediate
between central decision at dialect level and co-operation at language level
might be the right answer.
My user point of view is that Squeak VW Dolphin VisualAge Smalltalk/X etc...
should either discuss more about the kernel libraries or borrow more from
each other and do some sort of cross dialect refactoring...
Because it will ease porting from a Smalltalk dialect to another.
I would like to develop freeware, but i feel that maintaining several dialect
dependent versions of a general purpose library is a bad situation...
Smalltalk has not been invented to fall back to the C code #ifdef _MSCVER
nightmare, has it ?
As a commercially paying Smalltalk user in a previous job, I can tell you that
it has also been a brake on using Smalltalk, because it is neither a good
situation being bound to a vendor specific environment and library. And the
cost of porting is high. If i want to reduce the cost by porting some base
library in another vendor image, there will certainly be some licensing
problems, though i am pretty sure every body do it...
My advice to commercial Smalltalks: forget about copywriting and patenting
libraries, you are killing yourself. Maybe better concentrate on VM
optimizations, services, or i don't know, you'll have to invent... And please
do favour inter dialect library exchange, you all are to win of it. Don't be
on the defensive, behind a Maginot line, you're dead, trust a french.
I am sure Squeak team agree since non commercial. But maybe i am out of the
scope of this list again ?
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|