[Vm-dev] I just did a terrible thing :-)

[Tobias Pape]

> On 19.09.2020, at 19:40, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On 2020-09-19, at 8:40 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Smalltalkers,
>> 
>>    I just made a Smalltalk := nil type blunder.  I wrote:
>> 
>> 			TVariableNode setName:
>> 				(node selector = #maxVal
>> 						ifTrue: ['MaxSmallInteger']
>> 						ifFalse: ['MinSmallInteger'])
>> 
>> and suddenly parse tree printing didn't work and TVariableNode was called MaxSmallInteger :-)
> 
> This is just one of the reasons I'd really like properly done private methods; if the Class>setName: method were private you wouldn't have been able to do this. And a lot of other people (ie almost certainly absolutely every person the ever wrote any Smalltalk) wouldn't make a whole raft of mistakes.
> 
> I'm not sure we could do it without breaking so much code that we  exploded our brains. Sigh

The beauty is, tho, we can recover from these mistakes with the same tools we make them with.

-t

> 
> tim