[squeak-dev] Re: Unload Traits script

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Mon May 12 13:11:42 UTC 2008


2008/5/12, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de>:
> Philippe Marschall wrote:
>
> >
> > >  It gives you an image, a) without traits, and b) with the old class
> format.
> > >
> > >  The aim being to 1) enable folks with code that relies on the old
> format to
> > > move up to 3.10 should they so desire 2) Satisfy those who dont like the
> > > existing traits based traits implementation and would like to have
> something
> > > simpler and 3) Provide a starting point for a future simpler traits
> > > implementation if anyone wants to write it.
> > >
> >
> > What about people who need traits?
> >
>
>  There is no reason why a traits implementation needs to be as intrusive as
> this one. Earlier this year I had been playing with a traits implementation
> for Croquet just to understand some of the implementation aspects a little
> better and it was pretty clear that an alternative implementation which is
> much less invasive is not only trivial to do but fits much better into the
> rest of the existing system. I'm attaching a draft version of this
> experiment (which is not fully functional since I lost interest but it will
> load into Croquet and is enough to play with it) and you can check it out to
> see how it hooks into the system - basically traits inherit from
> ClassDescription which avoids most of the code duplication and leaves the
> option for perhaps having stateful traits at some point. The extension
> points to the existing kernel are few (and could be made fewer) and loading
> and unloading would be trivial with just a tiny bit more work.
>
>  In any case, this is not a complete implementation but rather an
> illustration that the current implementation isn't the only way traits can
> be implemented in Squeak and that an alternative can be small, loadable, and
> easy to understand.

All fine and well. But my question is what about people with existing
traits code (like myself). I don't really care about the
implementation (it's OO after all). I care wether the stuff actually
works or not.

Cheers
Philippe



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