On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 6:41 PM, David Mitchell
<david.mitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wow, this thread came alive from the archive!

Yea, sorry about that.  I've been tied completely up for months.

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

Well, you aren't the first person to mention it, so I just thought the
other side should be represented.  I.e. I didn't mean it to be
directed at you personally, but rather to defend dynamic array syntax.

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

All dialects have a way to modify the parser don't they (probably a
really simple way in many of them)?  Maybe an alternative would be to
just make a package that adds the syntax to any Smalltalk.  Then
people could use it if the want and just site the package as a
dependancy.

>  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.

That is a good way of doing it, but the maintenance cost comes from
how much code is there, not how much was typed.  This is a huge
problem Java has.  Java wizards say "It doesn't matter how verbose the
syntax is, I just generate all the boilerplate".  But that doesn't
help the guy maintaining the code very much.