On Sunday, July 21, 2002, at 06:54 Uhr, Andreas Raab wrote:
Marcel, David,
It is quite easy to imagine
Imagination is one thing...experience another. Somehow, this reminds me of all the awful things that people (strongly) advocating mandatory static+manifest typing keep telling Smalltalkers will happen, which Smalltalkers just don't seem to see happening. Show me some evidence that this actually *does* happen in real life
That was exactly the question I raised to begin with. Nevin's paper quotes a few problems that don't apply to Smalltalk (like auto-coercing nil into different atomic types on varying platforms) and I was really wondering how much of a problem the message eating behavior can cause in practice. I guess there are always a lot of theoretical arguments that can be made here (similarly to the issue of static typing) and only time and experience can tell what works and what doesn't.
Exactly! That was the point I was trying to get across: despite all the horrible things that can happen in theory, it seems to have worked remarkably well in practice, certainly for me and also for many others.
Of course, one has to take Nevin's point into account: there may very well be more problems if you mix with code that doesn't expect a message-eating nil.
Marcel
-- Marcel Weiher Metaobject Software Technologies marcel@metaobject.com www.metaobject.com Metaprogramming for the Graphic Arts. HOM, IDEAs, MetaAd etc.