On 3 January 2014 19:32, Tobias Pape Das.Linux@gmx.de wrote:
On 03.01.2014, at 20:18, Chris Muller ma.chris.m@gmail.com wrote:
OK, so that's you & I in agreement. I think Colin's happy for it to go. Any ol' timers out there with warnings of doom, before I rip this out?
Just FYI: this makes it impossible to use/port CodeTalk[1] in/to Squeak 4.5. And I actually used it once or twice, not that this would be important :)
Oh, that does matter. Tobias, I think you're saying CodeTalk wants to store Text into the .changes and possibly MC because that's where it stores its code annotations. Is that right? But they don't actually need that preference too do they?
It just stores its information as text attributes, which then goes to the Changes file, IIRC. It has to patch monticello in order to save the information but that is independent of the style stuff.
As a matter of fact, CodeTalk forces the Preference to be ON.
So effectively CodeTalk turns
newText := (requestor notNil and: [Preferences confirmFirstUseOfStyle]) ifTrue: [aText askIfAddStyle: priorMethodOrNil req: requestor] ifFalse: [aText]
into aText?
Doing that means we can rip out #askIfAddStyle:req and Preferences confirmFirstUseOfStyle. That would sever the Collections -> Tools dependency, and would be a late Christmas treat for me.
frank
We should account for Robert Hirschfelds group which has put out some great tools and projects. CodeTalk wants to continue to push Smalltalk ahead of the rest of the world still stuck in plain-text.
So, based on this, I think we should not change policy w.r.t. storing Text vs. Strings. Text has #asString, so it doesn't seem there should be any extra complexity to deal with the outside world; probably less than trying to rip out something that's integrated and works.
Thanks.
Best -Tobias
[1] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/trac/SqueakCommunityProjects/wiki/...