pipe

Ramon Leon ramon.leon at allresnet.com
Mon Aug 27 00:40:51 UTC 2007


> I might even get convinced otherwise with some examples ... !!!
> 
> At least I have tried to expose an issue with concrete 
> examples on why the pipe is so important. No examples have 
> come to defend the cascade... of course in a context of a new 
> Smalltalk.

Pick your battles, there's absolutely no reason to confuse the issue of
adding a pipe with the issue of an existing feature the cascade.

The pipe thing is a good idea, but it's totally unrelated to cascading, and
cascading is deeply embedded into Smalltalk, so it's a waste of energy
discussing it, it's not going away and it's not going to change.  Focus on
the pipe idea instead.  

As for cascade examples, see the Seaside web framework, the html api relies
heavily on the cascade operator to set attributes on tags.  It's not enough
to "hope" that some method returns self, I'd have to verify that assumption
constantly, the cascade guarantees me the receiver of the following
selector.  There are also many times you don't want a selector returning
self, and cascading allows me to still call those selectors inline without
the need for a temporary variable.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com




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