On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 6:41 PM, David Mitchell david.mitchell@gmail.com wrote:
Wow, this thread came alive from the archive!
Yea, sorry about that. I've been tied completely up for months.
Note that I wasn't advocating for or against brace notation.
Well, you aren't the first person to mention it, so I just thought the other side should be represented. I.e. I didn't mean it to be directed at you personally, but rather to defend dynamic array syntax.
But, if you are trying to write code that is portable across Smalltalk dialects, you avoid brace notation.
All dialects have a way to modify the parser don't they (probably a really simple way in many of them)? Maybe an alternative would be to just make a package that adds the syntax to any Smalltalk. Then people could use it if the want and just site the package as a dependancy.
As I think it would be easier to update. I use literal forms to save myself typing but when I commit code, I'd rather have the long form. In fact, I've sent #sourceString to literal arrays so I could get the long form without all the typing.
That is a good way of doing it, but the maintenance cost comes from how much code is there, not how much was typed. This is a huge problem Java has. Java wizards say "It doesn't matter how verbose the syntax is, I just generate all the boilerplate". But that doesn't help the guy maintaining the code very much.