[squeak-dev] Ancient Mantis Report - 1650 PrimitiveScanCharacters

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Mon Jul 22 01:53:21 UTC 2013


On 21-07-2013, at 5:55 PM, "Juan Vuletich (mail lists)" <juanlists at jvuletich.org> wrote:

> Quoting Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>:
> 
>> Clearly, character scanning inner loop is now written all in Smalltalk, and that seems efficient enough on our computers.
>> Is it a problem on Pi?
>> IMHO, the thing to do would be to document the primitive as backward compatibility support only (interpreter VM)
>> In case of COG, since there is no such backward compatibility anyway, drop the primitives.
> 
> Please don't drop it. Cuis is using it right now.

Fair point; if it is still a useful primitive to any current usages, then it ought to stay around. Certainly in the plain interpreter it is needed for the really old images - like Scratch.

> In addition, it is not impossible to build closures (and Cog) enabled variations of  other relevant images forked before 3.8, that don't include i18n. For example, Scratch or Sophie.

Scratch actually has i18n except a really odd form that drastically needs replacing for modern images. I'm tearing my hair out over it.


> When I converted Cuis to closures, I did (and published) a better way to do the conversion, in the hope that others would use it to convert other images...
> 
> Besides, I think it could also be possible to make good use of the primitive for newer Squeak images, when using pure ASCII (i.e. Smalltalk code), and on slow hardware as the PI. Of course, some work would be needed for this.

We could, for example, fix the primitive to handle a nil map array, just as the older backup code did. It would also have to cope with a different instance variable layout… maybe it would be better to add a new primitive instead? At least that would be clean. Since current images  can't use the old primitive they'd lose nothing and future images would gain the new primitive.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
I majored in Art and Logic. Now I draw my own conclusions




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list