Want: #slice: (Re: [squeak-dev] Noob question: array slice?)

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Fri Aug 6 10:19:40 UTC 2010


On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Casey Ransberger
<casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> I get that, now, but thanks. What I really want, though, is to have a method in the system named something starting with 'slice,' because that's what I (and most of my friends, really,) would look for when trying to do the thing I was trying to do when I couldn't find a method that did what I wanted to do. When I think about grabbing a subset of a SequenceableCollection, I don't think to use the word 'copy' to find what I'm looking for.

There are lots of things in Smalltalk with odd names.  My favorite
example is inject:into: with ought to have "reduce" in its name.  Some
are new or little used and so not hard to change.   Some are well
established and so have become part of the language and so are hard to
change.  Of course, "hard" doesn't mean "impossible".  But it would
probably take a long and concerted effort to get people to change this
name, and the chance of failure is high.

It is easy to change Smalltalk for yourself.   It is hard to get other
people to change theirs.  Even if you got your methods into Squeak, a
lot of people would avoid using them because they would want their
code to be compatible with other Smalltalks.

-Ralph



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