On Aug 7, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Jason Johnson wrote:

> I was under the impression that now is the best time ever to get  
> needed things into the image.  The "Message eating null" and  
> namespaces are big controversial things that can't be ignored once  
> present.  But this package seems like a "no-brainer" since it's  
> just method adds and they put in something that seems glaringly  
> missing from Squeak at the moment.  If you have tests and things  
> you should still try I would say, there might still be time.

I wouldn't call it a no-brainer. In fact, if it was up to me, I  
wouldn't add these methods to the base image, for two reasons:

1. They're not idiomatic Smalltalk. If you need to join a collection  
of strings into a single string with a separator it's easy to do with  
#streamConents: and #do:separatedBy:. If you find you're doing it so  
often that you want something more succinct, that's a code smell.

2. The base image should be getting smaller, not bigger. Split-join  
can live quite well as an external package.

I've been asked about the lack of #join: a few times by people coming  
to Smalltalk from Ruby or Python. They were incredulous that such a  
fundamental thing was missing. But in Smalltalk it's not fundamental  
- Smalltalk is object-oriented, not string-oriented.

Colin