PositionnableStream>>peekFor: not standard

brad fowlow fowlow at pacbell.net
Thu Mar 1 08:03:49 UTC 2007


I'd guess it was just a nod to the rest of the world.

There are a lot of peeks in a lot of stream implementations out there,
and pretty much all of them leave the result in the stream.

When I see peek in the name of a stream operation,
my hindbrain reads it as non-consuming.

Sometimes there are peeks that alter the stream - operations that
consume everything up to - but not including - a sought-after character.

But the thing you're peeking at is unaffected; that's a very common  
convention
about what the word 'peek'  conveys in the name of a stream operation.

- b


> I can't help but wonder how ANSI ended up with that definition if  
> basically every Smalltalk in existence does it differently. Just  
> one of those "design by committee" decisions? Or perhaps there is a  
> good reason for it that just never made the light of the day?  
> Mostly, the standards committee seemed to have gone with existing  
> notions if there wide agreement on them - peekFor: seems to be one  
> of those cases where the standard went wildly differently and I  
> really wonder why.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list