[squeak-dev] Re: Can i has underscores? :)

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Wed Apr 14 17:09:32 UTC 2010


On 4/14/2010 9:26 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> On 14 April 2010 19:13, Andreas Raab<andreas.raab at gmx.de>  wrote:
>> Yes "we could", "we might perhaps" or "we ought to consider". So where is
>> that code you speak of? I have been asking for it during the ealier
>> discussions. The only thing I got back was hand-waiving.
>
> Completely correct statement.
> Now think, who will write this code, knowing that some of hand-wavers
> turn into a 'only over my dead body'
> after you give them a working solution. So, why wasting time on
> something which will never be accepted?

It's a measure of your interest in moving this issue forward. If you 
don't care enough to write the conversion code, why would anyone else? 
Remember this is an "scratch your own itch" community; you can't expect 
others to do things for you if you're not willing to do them yourself.

> I know for myself, how many of my ideas was rejected. And how many
> things which i implemented never adopted in Squeak.

I don't actually recall very many. Definitely fewer than the ideas I've 
posted and that never got implemented or adopted :-) If you want *all* 
of your own ideas adopted you'll have to write your own system. This is 
a community and we make community decisions, meaning that not all of 
your (or mine, or anyone else's) ideas will get adopted.

> So, i found that its better to keep discussing these issues over and
> over again, up to the point where majority accepting the proposal,
> only then its worth spending time implementing it.

I think that in this case this may be a flawed approach. We know people 
feel differently about this issue. I think we can get agreement that the 
core should be "underscore neutral" i.e., not requiring a particular 
underscore interpretation (neither assignment, nor selector etc).

This leaves the question of what the default interpretation for a 
shipping release should be. And from my point of view, that decision 
depends *purely* on the compatibility issue. We simply can't afford not 
to be able to file in our own code.

There are various other simple things that could be done to soothe the 
underscore proponents, for example rendering := as <- via Shout instead 
of pretty print *which destroys method formatting). But these 
discussions are kinda pointless as long as we have the gaping 
compatibility hole.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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