> On 5/18/07, J J <azreal1977 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Any interest in making a separate list or something for MC 2  
>> discussion?

I'd prefer the discussion to take place on squeak-dev.

On May 18, 2007, at 16:06 , Ralph Johnson wrote:
> One of the problems with MC is that it doesn't have an explicit
> representation of what goes in to a package, but instead relies on
> names.  The name of a class's cateogry determins which package the
> class it is in, and if a method is going to belong to a package other
> than the package of its class, it must be in a protocol whose name is
> '*' followed by the name of the package.  This was an expedient hack,
> but it causes lots of trouble in the long run.  A package should just
> be a list of classes and methods.  Perhaps the default is for all the
> classes in one particular cateogry to be in the same package, but that
> shouldn't be the rule.

Actually, MC does *not* define what goes into a package. It leaves  
this to PackageInfo. The default package info provides "virtual"  
packages based on naming conventions in the image. This solved the  
chicken-and-egg problem of how to introduce a packaging system  
without having package tool support in all the coding tools.

But it's very possible to have your own PackageInfo that just has a  
list of classes and methods which is not category-based.  I believe  
someone actually started working on this, but can't quite remember  
the state of this effort.

- Bert -