As far as the range "operator," well, a kid can dream. But about #slice:

I'm talking about wrapping a method, not replacing it. I CC'd James Robertson, even though Cincom is unlikely to consider "yet another method."

It's literally adding a method to make the cuneiform smalltalk crap accessible to new people, who are liable to search on terms like 'slice.'

On Aug 6, 2010, at 3:19 AM, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:

> 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
>