Fear and loathing of the "perification" of Smalltalk

Martin Beck martin.beck at hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Sat Sep 15 18:52:06 UTC 2007


Hi,

Am Samstag, 15. September 2007 00:11:29 schrieb Peter William Lount:
> > Your syntax change does early binding of a name to an implementing Block,
> > which we don't want in Smalltalk... :)
>
> Please explain further, I didn't get your meaning.
Okay, it was a small ironic joke: Dynamic Languages do late binding, as we all 
know. However, you want to assign names to a block directly, meaning early 
binding. ;) I think, I would get rid of the method syntax in any textual 
class representation like file outs. But, if needed, one can automatically 
visualize the block/method-source code in the "old" method syntax in the 
browser. Meaning, if you load a method, its underlying block is converted to 
method syntax and when you save it, the source code is converted back to a 
usual block and binded to the class. This is visual stuff which can be done 
by the system browsers. The compiler doesn't need to know. However, these are 
only some thinkings, perhaps I should get my hands back on some coding to see 
whether they have any value :)

> [... cut ... ]
Fully ACK. :)

Regards,
Martin



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