On 4/28/10, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse at inria.fr> wrote:
> Hannes
>
> We know pragmas since they appeared a while ago in VW. We are good
> metaprogrammers
> and know that annotation are good to a certain extent: I do not like the
> delegate annotation used
> by vassily in VW because they changed the semantics of the system.
>
> Now we got lengthy discussion a while ago in the pharo mailing-list and may
> be in the squeak one since I remember andreas presenting his view. We
> reached a consensus, alain changed his implementation to fit the result of
> the discussions and we are quite happy
> with it.
> - We can package setting in a package or outside (outside is better since we
> do not have dead code)
> when preferences are not loaded, but this is the choice of the package
> designer.
> - We use a builder so that we do not have to have a mini language
> interpreter for the pragmas.
>
> As I said we are happy with it and we hope to get rid of Preferences
> completely :).
>
>
> Stef
>

Stéphane

Thank you for your update on this issue.
Do you have a link to writeup what the consensus for Pharo is
regarding pragmas / method annotation / use of metadata?

For which areas are they used? What are the conventions? For Squeak we
do not necessarily want to do something different unless we think it
is necessary because of shortcomings of your solutions (as perceived
from our point of view).

And I think the discussion on the Squeak list seems to develop into a
direction where people want to get rid of the Preferences class like
you.

--Hannes