On Aug 25, 2007, at 2:57 PM, Fabio Filasieno wrote:

>
> db getBlogposts
>     | filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7 days)]
>     | filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )]
>     | collectMails
>     | do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

Thanks for the example.  This is a very clean looking bit of code.   
However, as others have noted, it's not fair to conclude that you've  
won the argument after comparing it to:
((((db getBlogposts) filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7  
days)]) filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )])  
collectMails ) do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

You can format the above so that it is very close to your example:
((((db getBlogposts
	) filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7 days)]
	) filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )]
	) collectMails
	) do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

In my opinion, your code looks nicer for two reasons.  You don't need  
the initial parentheses, and '|' looks nicer to me than ')'.   
However, it's been established that '|' is not available, so I tried  
out your example with some of the other proposals from the thread.

db getBlogposts
	` filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7 days)]
	` filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )]
	` collectMails
	` do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

db getBlogposts
	$ filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7 days)]
	$ filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )]
	$ collectMails
	$ do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

db getBlogposts
	;; filter: [ :blogPost | blogPost data < (today - 7 days)]
	;; filter: [ :blogPost | db coolPosts includes: item )]
	;; collectMails
	;; do: [ :mail | "Happy to announce ..."]

The backtick is perhaps the cleanest-looking alternative, and it  
doesn't have any conflicting associations with other Smalltalk syntax.

I don't like '$' very much... it looks very "heavy", and it looks a  
lot like a character literal even though it has nothing to do with  
them.  I'm not sure how much we benefit by looking familiar to  
Haskell programmers.  <ducks and covers...>  Probably not as much as  
by adopting Java syntax to be familiar to the curly-brace crowd ;-) .

My favorite is ';;'.  Most importantly, it shares both visual and  
semantic similarity with the cascade operator, since both operators  
affect the receiver of the subsequent message.  Also, IMHO it looks  
quite clean.

Josh

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