Sake = Rake for Smalltalk?

Hans-Martin Mosner hmm at heeg.de
Wed May 17 04:35:27 UTC 2006


Colin Putney wrote:

>
> On May 16, 2006, at 4:38 PM, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>
>> Yes I know I thought about it too but I never liked the idea that  
>> sending a message would create
>> a method or a class. May be I'm too old fashioned :)
>
>
> Is there another way to do it?

Of course not - under the hood everything in Smalltalk is done by 
sending messages to objects.
IMO the question is whether the source code snippet for defining a class 
should have the syntactic form of a message send, or something else.
Personally, I like it as it is, but we already have a discrepancy in the 
browser (and in file-outs):
When we define methods, we don't write
SomeClass compile: 'method source' classified: 'protocol'
because that would be pretty clumsy.

Now for class definitions, I don't see how all the alternative 
approaches of defining classes give a real advantage over the 
traditional message send expression.
VisualWorks introduced a new set of selectors to accomodate namespaces, 
but it's still a valid expression.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin



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