Wow, this thread came alive from the archive!

Note that I wasn't advocating for or against brace notation.

But, if you are trying to write code that is portable across Smalltalk
dialects, you avoid brace notation.

On my projects, I would rather maintain:
dictionary := Dictionary new
 at: $a put: 1;
 at: $b put: 2;
 at: $c put: 3;
 yourself.

than { $a -> 1. $b -> 2. $c -> 3 } asDictionary

As I think it would be easier to update. I use literal forms to save
myself typing but when I commit code, I'd rather have the long form.
In fact, I've sent #sourceString to literal arrays so I could get the
long form without all the typing.

On 5/14/08, Jason Johnson <jason.johnson.081 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:23 PM, David Mitchell
> <david.mitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >  Brace notation for dynamic arrays!
>
> So instead of:
>
> dictionary := { $a -> 1. $b -> 2. $c -> 3 } asDictionary.
>
> I need to type:
>
> dictionary := Dictionary new
>                       add: $a -> 1;
>                       add: $b -> 2;
>                       add: $c -> 3;
>                       yourself.
>
> ?  In my opinion the other dialects should adopt this or propose
> another way of doing it.  No concise syntax for dynamically creating a
> collection seems a problem to me, and easy to remedy in a language
> where one has access to the reader/compiler.  So why would it be bad
> to do so?
>