Hi Lukas,

I perfectly understand your argument. duplicating args in temporaries is 
bad.

But you reformulate Tim so well: It might also confuse beginners,
that i cannot believe you did not understand him.
He did not mean anything else.

And I feel like the example given by stephane is exactly a case of such 
confusion.

asPacked
     ^ self
         inject: 0
         into: [:t1 :t2 | t1 := t1 * 256 + t2 asInteger]

unless it is just an effect of Decompiler?
Who would name block variables t1 and t2 but the Decompiler?

However, stupid me, one thing I cannot understand is the reason to do so 
for ImageSegment. Any light on this?


Nicolas

Lukas Renggli a écrit :
>> Perhaps if you think of it along the lines of:-
>> a) names in a method are just local tags for programmer convenience
>> so that you don't have to keep it all in your head as you read/write
>> code,
>> b) objects passed into the method as parameters are bound to the
>> parameter tags;
>> it might help.
> 
> I don't understand what you mean.
> 
> Temps and method and block arguments are all slots in some context
> object. It is only the compiler that tries to stop you in an
> inconsistent way from assigning to some of these slots. I initially
> asked because I find that an unnecessary restriction. Usually the
> philosophy of Smalltalk is to open the possibilities that the
> programmer has, not to arbitrarily restrict them.
> 
> I don't say it is good style to assign to arguments. It might also
> confuse beginners, I agree. I don't even suggest to change the
> language. I only asked why this restriction was made in the first
> place. Luckily you can always use the debugger/inspector or
> thisContext tempAt:put: (there are a few methods that actually do that
> in the standard image) to change these values.
> 
> Lukas
>