[squeak-dev] Re: pragmas usage

Ramon Leon ramon.leon at allresnet.com
Mon Mar 17 03:23:16 UTC 2008


> > If pragmas were available when you started developing 
> Magritte, I am 
> > curious  if and why you might have used them (or not)?
> 
> Certainly I would have used them. This could have avoided 
> those ugly naming conventions for the descriptions. The 
> problem is that there is still a lot of industrial code in 
> Squeak 3.7 and 3.8 that depends on Magritte.
> 
> As Philippe pointed out there was MAPragmaBuilder. I never 
> used it in Pier, due to backward compatibility concerns.
> 
> Lukas

You'd have used them for pointing to descriptions to avoid naming
conventions, but I think what Sophie's getting at is what you think of
pragmas as a meta layer instead of descriptions to embed the metadata
directly into accessors.

Sophie, if you haven't already, I'd recommend you read his thesis on
Magritte, it'd probably answer many questions about why Magritte made
certain design choices.  Pragmas are static and aren't nearly as flexible as
Magritte descriptors, which are real objects and don't face the limitations
of pragmas.

Ramon Leon
http://onsmalltalk.com




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