On 20 July 2013 18:09, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
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> On 20-07-2013, at 9:36 AM, Bob Arning <arning315 at comcast.net> wrote:
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>> When I see longer ways of saying something replacing shorter ways, I always wonder if the perceived benefit has been realized. Are there success stories out there for "SmalltalkImage current" enabling something cool that "Smalltalk" could not?
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> IIRC the original idea was that SystemDictionary was overloaded with nothing-to-do-with-dictionary methods and needed to go on a diet. I don't recall it being suggested that the smarter thing would have been to remove the *dictionary* stuff and put that somewhere else to use as an environment for compiling, leaving the useful system management methods attached to something called 'Smalltalk'. I really don't like the current (sic) setup where there is SmalltalkImage SystemNavigation and Smalltalk and probably other split out stuff I haven't even found.
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> Time for re-unification.

I'm actually in favour of _more_ splitting out. Having a one-stop-shop
reference for all your everythings means loads of things referencing
the one-stop shop. That makes modularity difficult.

However, a possible resolution of the Tim vs Frank Paradox is to move
SmalltalkImage into Kernel, and have other packages _extend_
SmalltalkImage. Instead of "SystemNavigation default" you'd have
"Smalltalk organizer", and so on.

Having said that, we have bigger fish to fry. It's easy for us to
bicker over the colour of the bikeshed, but we should really be
spending our time beating on Environments and making the tools work
correctly with same.

So I'd just like to ask one thing. Is everyone happy with changing
"SmalltalkImage current" references to "Smalltalk"? Doing so makes my
job of decreasing coupling between packages much easier, because every
SmalltalkImage reference I remove is one less dependency on
System-Support. (It might also be more Environmentally friendly!)

frank

> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Klingon Code Warrior:- 6) "Our competitors are without honor!"
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