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 ?




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