On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 08:46:18 -0700, "Ramon Leon" <ramon.leon at allresnet.com>
wrote:

> If one chooses to only write portable Smalltalk, what's the point in having
> different distributions?  Squeak "IS" the experimental Smalltalk, the
> proving ground for things that might later be accepted by those other
> distributions.  If every Smalltalk had the same literal array syntax, I have
> no doubt everyone would use them because they are clearly syntactically
> better than the alternative.

Well, clearly I use Squeak for almost everything I do (at least
personally), but let's face it - most of the interesting stuff in Squeak is
not in what I consider the "baseline" classes - Collections, Numbers,
Streams, etc.

The really cool stuff in Squeak is in the graphics, and GUI, and Multimedia
support, and so on. It seems pretty obvious that none of this code is
portable to other Smalltalks.

I guess I should expand a bit here. Its not just because I like to write
quasi-portable code. I also have been doing this stuff for a long time, and
the literal syntax is a relatively new thing, and I just never saw enough
of an advantage to it, given the number of times I ever build collections
like that in real code.

I like things that are simple. One of the reasons I like Smalltalk so much
is because it is simple. The BNF chart for the language is incredibly
small. Any changes made to it should be carefully considered from a
cost-benefit analysis.

All this has been said before in the various threads on this subject.

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
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