[squeak-dev] Block argument syntax

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Fri Mar 1 18:48:23 UTC 2013


Just a quick reminder that this part of Smalltalk syntax came from Logo.
There you define a new function as

to spiral :length :angle

and most implementations (if not all) are ok with spaces between the ":"
and the argument names. This was an attempt to make the declaration
reflect usage (C style), where

"x  means the symbol "x"
x  means the function named "x"
thing "x  means the value of the variable named "x"
:x   is syntatic sugar for the previous case

In Smalltalk-72 and -74 the last option was also used in code, but that
got dropped in -76 and only the block declarations stayed unchanged all
the way to -80.

-- Jecel



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