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Well, it's syntactic sugar. It looks pretty alien in Smalltalk, but other languages support multiple-assignment (e.g. "swap" {a. b} := {b. a}). Of course this gets tricky because if you have multiple assignment it seems natural to return multiple values from a function (e.g. {a. b} := a swapWith: b). That would probably require a big change to implement and you end up with something Smalltalk can already do other ways, and become (more) incompatible with other dialects.<br><br>> To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org<br>> From: blake@kingdomrpg.com<br>> Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:58:25 -0700<br>> Subject: Re: Newbie question<br>> <br>> On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:27:21 -0700, subbukk <subbukk@gmail.com> wrote:<br>> <br>> > On Monday 23 July 2007 11:39 pm, Bert Freudenberg wrote:<br>> ><br>> >> Now, at one point the compiler even supported this:<br>> >><br>> >> {a. b} := {1. 2}<br>> >><br>> >> which I found cool but was considered evil, even by those who<br>> >> tolerate the braces ...<br>> <br>> What would this do? It looks like you're assigning a literal to another <br>> literal?<br>> <br><br /><hr />Don't get caught with egg on your face. <a href='http://club.live.com/chicktionary.aspx?icid=chick_wlmailtextlink' target='_new'>Play Chicktionary! </a></body>
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