new Smalltalk programmer's thoughts
Wolfgang Helbig
helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE
Mon May 1 12:02:19 UTC 2006
Hi Hans-Martin,
you posed the question
>The question is: do we want to let hardware characteristics dominate our
>way of thinking?
And the answer is no!
And I deeply appreciate Smalltalk for the #// and #\\ operators, for Integers
that are unlimeted, and for things like garbage collection that no real machine
can achieve! Smalltalk leverages on being run by a virtual machine. And it does
very well so. Furthermore, it lets you adopt things to your likes much easier
than any other language I know. (I don't know Lisp) So, in this respect, I
couldn't agree more with you.
>collection, I want the first at index 1 and the fifth at index 5. When
>I'm using Integers, I don't want to think about 16 vs 32 bits, signed vs
>unsigned etc.
>The argument about loop bounds is somewhat related. I've seen quite some
>beginner's C code which did "for (i=0; i<=10; i++)" to address a
>10-element array :-) Seasoned C programmers don't do that anymore, but
>it tells me a bit about what is "natural" :-)
And that is my point: Different challenges need different numbers for the first
index. When I am implementing a Gaussian algorithm to invert matrices, I'd never
use 0 as the first index. But whenever I am computing indexes, I'd never use
one as the first index. And this is not supported by BASIC and Smalltalk.
Greetings,
Wolfgang
>
>Cheers,
>Hans-Martin
--
Weniger, aber besser.
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