<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 7:37 AM, Nicolas Cellier <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com">nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Yeah, I discovered these strange customs with<br>
<a href="http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7352" target="_blank">http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7352</a><br>
To me, the whole API looks hackish and messy, but it seems to be used,<br>
so will be hard to remove...</blockquote><div><br></div><div>The reason they're used is that they are the easiest way to create methods which do the right thing with optional parameters. Now perhaps the "right thing" to do would be add a feature to the parser that allowed methods to "degrade" such that:</div>
<div><br></div><div>foo:withBar:andNarf: </div><div><br></div><div>can be</div><div><br></div><div>foo:withBar:</div><div><br></div><div>and</div><div><br></div><div>foo:</div><div><br></div><div>or event possibly</div><div>
<br></div><div>foo</div><div><br></div><div>rather than having to write 4 separate methods. It is incredibly useful when you have say block closures stuck in a dictionary that has the block closures swapped out based on the behavior of those blocks. Where would you ever use such at thing? Poker playing AI! Seriously, if you're implementing a system that can play a game like "Follow the Queen" , the rules of the game change based on what cards are showing. The easiest way to implement this is to swap out individual rules when some events happen. </div>
<div><br></div><div>But discussions like this go nowhere fast :) For example:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/rademers/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3285925252">http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/rademers/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3285925252</a> </div>
<div><br></div><div>and</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.smalltalk.org/articles/article_20050216_a1.html">http://www.smalltalk.org/articles/article_20050216_a1.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>actually its a shame the discussion hasn't been more vigorous :)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Dave</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- <a href="http://blog.dloh.org/">http://blog.dloh.org/</a><br>