<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/19/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Bert Freudenberg</b> <<a href="mailto:bert@freudenbergs.de">bert@freudenbergs.de</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Sep 18, 2007, at 18:09 , Jason Johnson wrote:<br><br>> Oh no, are people really so strongly for ::?<br><br>I'm rather strongly against ".". And not only because the dot is<br>already too overloaded in Smalltalk.
<br><br>Dot-notation is becoming ubiquitous in "pop CS" to the point where<br>people don't even admit there are alternatives. In one German state<br>teaching "dot notation" to kids is made mandatory by the school
<br>administration, ruling out the use of Smalltalk as a teaching<br>language. I kid you not.<br><br>Having it creep into Squeak would make this individual sad. If this<br>means anything to anybody ;)</blockquote><div><br>
I'm sorry to hear that. If it gets in, I might send you a beer to cheer you up.<br><br>Could you explain how the dot is overloaded in Smalltalk? Currently I'm only aware that it's used for ending statements.<br>
<br>The fact that the dot notation (in the context of Namespaces, I assume) is popular is quite important. If it comes only with a small grammatic and typographic cost, then in my opinion it's a good idea to keep things consistent across languages.
<br><br>What do other Smalltalks use? Could somebody knowledgable give me a quick run-down?<br><br>Other programming languages:<br>Python - '.'<br>Java - '.'<br>C++ - '::'<br>C# - '.'<br>Erlang - ':'
<br>Haskell - '.' (note 1)<br><br>Not a programming language<br>XML - ':' (?)<br>Filesystems - '/', '\', ':'.<br><br>(1) <a href="http://bardolph.ling.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/haskell98-report/hier.pdf.gz">
http://bardolph.ling.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/haskell98-report/hier.pdf.gz</a><br><br><br></div><br></div><br>