On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 8:12 PM, James Foster <Smalltalk at jgfoster.net> wrote:
> On May 14, 2008, at 6:47 PM, Jason Johnson wrote:
>
> I don't think that Dolphin or GemStone/S have ways of modifying the parser.

You misunderstand me.  You have the parser code in your image and you
can modify it.  I meant that there is probably a "standard" way to do
it in many of the Smalltalks.  Though in Dolphin it isn't needed since
they already have macros (the ## syntax).

> I thought that with Smalltalk we claim that the more verbose code was
> helpful for maintenance. I'd much rather have keyword selectors than
> comma-separated arguments.

Well, you are applying the "verbose" label to something different then
I am.  Personally I prefer the keyword arguments and actually find it
concise and self documenting.  By verbose I meant "how many lines of
code to do something" and "how much of this code is just silly
boiler-plate that I just don't have a way to avoid".

I used to have a link of a study comparing Java, C++ and Smalltalk.
At that time Java was 3 times more productive then C++ and Smalltalk 3
times more productive then Java, based on how much code the developer
had to write.

>Also, I don't care much for syntactic shortcuts
> like dynamic constructors. Although people describe Lisp as simple, I keep
> getting lost on the meaning of a single forward quote, a single backward
> quote, a double quote, a comma, etc. One of the early languages I learned
> was M (aka, MUMPS), where the semicolon had four different meanings,
> depending on the context. Of course, we weren't conserving characters for
> the programmers or for the maintainers, but for the machine--each user had 2
> KB for code and data.
>
> James Foster
>
>