Fear and loathing of the "perification" of Smalltalk

Peter William Lount peter at smalltalk.org
Tue Sep 4 23:18:52 UTC 2007


Mathieu Suen wrote:
> On Sep 5, 2007, at 12:53 AM, Peter William Lount wrote:
>
>> The curly braces require the same virtual machine statement evaluator 
>> upgrade as the blocks version does, do it's not any more magic than 
>> the curly braces are doing! The "objects" (or "values" if you prefer) 
>> message simply calls an appropriate virtual machine primitive to 
>> collect up the results of each statement.
>
>
> No! the curly braces is not handle by the VM. Is translated by the 
> compiler.
>
>     Mth
>
Hi,

Oh, well putting it into the virtual machine is the best place for it in 
my view, but that's an implementation detail. Why is it the best? 
Performance and flexibility with all the capabilities fully realized.

What does the Squeak Compiler convert curly braced code into?

Certainly in another version of Smalltalk there will be two evaluators: 
one that returns the value of the last statement as normal, plus one 
that stores the results of each statement as it's evaluated into a 
collection.

Cheers,

Peter




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