[squeak-dev] small fix to help newbies

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Aug 8 10:33:23 UTC 2011


On 08.08.2011, at 10:44, Frank Shearar wrote:

> On 8 August 2011 03:42, P. <uploaded at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> I'm sending this email to both Squeak-dev and Pharo-project as you can see.
>> This is to suggest a fix.
>> 
>> I typed this on a workspace:
>> 
>> closure := [:x | Transcript show: x].
>> closure value: "hey".
>> 
>> And when I "did it", the VM had me looking at this:
>> 
>> closure := [:x | Transcript show: x].
>> closure value: "hey". Argument expected ->
>> 
>> Which is cryptic at best for a newbie.
>> I visited #squeak at irc.freenode.net and asked there.
>> Ken Causey helped me out and even he missed the difference between "" and ''
>> for a second.
>> I believe it would be beneficial to newbies to have this enhanced somehow,
>> to point
>> out the fact that strings aren't double-quoted.
> 
> Tricky, given that the error message is correct. After you strip out
> the comments, you have
> 
>  closer value: .
> 
> which is clearly not kosher.
> 
> What kind of fix would work for you?

It would be nicer if the "Argument expected" was shown right after the colon. Possibly the compiler could say what it saw instead ("found comment instead of argument").

- Bert -

> I'm just thinking that
> special-casing when you have a process part of a keyword message send
> followed by a comment is tricky:
> 
>  this is: "valid" code
> 
> for instance.
> 
> frank
> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Peter
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 




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