On Aug 25, 2007, at 11:30 PM, Ramon Leon wrote:

>> As observation..
>>
>> This discussion is a good example of purists who throwing away
>> any new ideas just because they 'don't follow standard' or
>> 'can be done with current syntax'.
>>
>> Honestly I see no harm in adding a pipe '|' symbol as a
>> special syntax symbol, like cascade ';' or period '.'
>> A pipe is like continuation which simply does: evaluate
>> expression to the left, then continue evaluation with
>> expression to the right, taking left result as receiver.
>> We need only minor changes to parser to add this syntax
>> sugar, and no changes in complier because it don't breaks old
>> syntax or message passing semantics.
>
> It's a good idea, the pipe, but not necessarily a well thought through
> implementation.  As Tim and Has point out, | is already used in  
> several
> places in the image and using it for special syntax for the pipe  
> would cause
> problems with existing code.  As Hans mentions, there's also the  
> issue of
> portability to other dialects.
>
> Fabio's proposal to hijack ; for a pipe operator is obviously a non  
> starter,
> he clearly doesn't understand how much Smalltalk code relies on ;.
>

I was a bit provocative because, I don't like the cascade and wanted  
to show that you most of the time you could do with out it ...  
getting more out of smalltalk ...

> The way to get past the purists isn't by argument, it's by showing  
> them an
> implementation that works, and addresses their concerns.  A working
> implementation is the difference between some who's serious about  
> an idea
> and someone who's just complaining.

As I said I'll see what I can do about that.

> It's easy to point at the old timers
> and blame them for blocking progress, it's much harder to do  
> something that
> would actually be considered progress.
>

Please, this is really unfair. Nobody ever blamed anybody.  We are  
just having a good chat. My point was : the cascade operator sucks  
the pipe rocks, and I've shown IMHO why it's better. And I love any  
critic I can get.



Fabio Filasieno




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