That sounds like a fine idea - I'll definitely continue to check it out.

I did spot a case or two where the point was to ultimately generate a  
symbol, but capitalized was an intermediate result so you ended up  
interning a bunch of intermediate results that were never used.

On Jan 2, 2007, at 2:13 AM, Ralph Johnson wrote:

>> I generally figure any string manipulation on a symbol results in a
>> string but Symbol>>capitalized is implemented as
>>
>> capitalized
>>
>>         ^self asString capitalized asSymbol
>>
>> I found this while watching the process browser running a lengthy
>> script in the background and found about 80% of time was spent in
>> WeakSet scanFor:
>>
>> I did a search of the image and couldn't find a single instance of
>> sending capitalized to a symbol where the caller was going to use it
>> as a symbol rather than a string.
>>
>> So, in the name of performance, I vote to nuke this method or change
>> it to just return a string.
>
> I would be much more convinced if you had said "I've been making this
> change to all my programs for the past year and have never ran into
> any difficulty because of it."
>
> There isn't much risk if you make that change to your image because
> you will remember that you made the change and if you run into a
> problem because of it, you'll probably catch it right away.  However,
> if we make the change to the standard image then it might change the
> behavior of someone's application who doesn't know the change was made
> and so will have a hard time figuring out what happened.
>
> I suggest you make that change in all your programs and report back
> next year.  In fact, I encourage lots of people to make that change.
> Then, when we have a debate in a year we can have testimonials like "I
> tried it and everything was fine" or "I tried it and it broke XXX".
> That would be the right time to make the change.  Or not.
>
> Performance improvements are good, and we want to be continually
> making them.  Hoever, they are rarely critical, and it is better to
> check them out carefully before making them.
>
> -Ralph Johnson
>