problem in porting from smalltalk

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Fri Feb 24 10:03:03 UTC 2006


<meta>
Not that I personally care that much about this particular name but you 
are touching a sore point here. That point is that in too many 
situations I have seen people copying really screwed up stuff from VW[*] 
and other systems just because they can't change it there and don't want 
to work around the differences. What happens then is that you are 
actively making Squeak worse by repeating a bad decision (even worse: 
you are repeating it although you have the benefit of hindsight) where 
instead you should be fixing the mistake and help make Squeak a better 
system.

And yes, I understand that this is inconvenient if you care about 
compatibility but slavishly repeating everything VW does will only get 
you a VW clone, not a better system.
</meta>

[*] My pet peeve these days: Proliferation of standard protocols for the 
"sake" of compatibility with X, Y, or Z. Just look at the evolution of 
the Collection protocols over the last 4-5 Squeak versions to see what I 
mean. I mean, if people need compatibility, why not make a compatibility 
*package*? Like, in this, a subclass of the real thing that's named 
Pragma and can be used if you need "compatible" pragmas.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

stéphane ducasse wrote:
> andreas may be VW people got first the wrong name, but using a 
> consistent one is better I think.
> 
> Stef
> 
> On 23 févr. 06, at 22:58, Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
>> Lukas Renggli wrote:
>>> The pragmas in 3.9 are not there to tweak the code generator. After
>>> parsing they are put into the compiled method, so that the system can
>>> query tagged methods. It has absolutely nothing to do with the
>>> #pragma, except that is shared its name.
>>
>> Which is precisely the reason why I originally called them 
>> "annotations" instead of pragmas.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   - Andreas
>>
> 
> 
> 




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