On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Göran Krampe <goran at krampe.se> wrote:


> ...so while not exactly Smalltalk code that can be fed to the regular
> Compiler it would still be parsed and executed like a series of #perform: to
> a builder object. It would be fast (modulo speed of #perform:), secure (you
> can't run arbitrary code) and avoids limits of Compiler.

With a little care, a format could be both normal Smalltalk code AND
something that would be easy to parse.  For example, it could have
only keyword messages and strings, perhaps boolean literals and
integers, but no binary messages, assignment, or array literals.
Thus, you could first implement a parser by just reading in the string
and evaluating it, and then you could build a real parser.  This would
make it easy to develop test-first, since you can focus first on
writing out the objects, and use the trivial way of reading them in to
test it.

-Ralph