[Vm-dev] Proposal: get rid of primitive numbers

[Igor Stasenko]

On 10 March 2012 23:12, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:08:08PM +0100, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>
>> I am get annoyed by these numbers..
>> why, living in our amazingly powerful smalltalk world, in order to see
>> what the primitive does,
>> i should first lookup the selector in #initializePrimitiveTable method?
>>
>> Is it so hard for compiler to lookup the prim by its symbolic name ,
>> why i forced to do that manually all the time?
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, can anyone say (without looking into image), what
>> <primitive: 135> does?
>> And now, same question, what
>> <primitive: #primitiveMillisecondClock>
>> does?
>>
>> Never ending fight: meaningful names vs meaningless numbers
>>
>
> FWIW here is what I use (attached).
>
> So for <primitive: 135> I would do "Interpreter browsePrimitive: 135".
>
This is better, but you still have to remember that you need to use
'Interpreter browsePrimitive:' expression
in order to get there, and you have to type it.
It saves you a bit of time, since now you don't have to manually
lookup the table

While in my case, you don't have to remember anything and just press
implementors of it.

> Dave
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.