Tim,
=================== I *thought* I had read that the use of the underscore for assign symbol had been expunged and all the code converted to use := but whilst looking at the compiled method source pointer stuff I noticed an awful lot of underscores still around. Is this a mistake or an unexpected reversion ? ===================
I don't know that I ever caught a final statement on it, but there appeared to be problems with the removal. First, there were troubles identifying comments and literals[*], and either related to the first snag or independently troublesome, I thought I read of widespread badness after the "fix".
My interest in underscores is mostly to enable them to appear within selectors. There is a fix for underscores at all but the first slot (which almost completely fixes the problem for me), and I would like to see it in the mainstream image if we can't fix the real problem. I had hoped that the fix would no longer be needed courtesy of m17n, but that appears not to have happened yet.
[*] Could the RB help?
Bill
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254
Email: bills@anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029
"Bill Schwab" BSchwab@anest.ufl.edu writes:
My interest in underscores is mostly to enable them to appear within selectors. There is a fix for underscores at all but the first slot (which almost completely fixes the problem for me), and I would like to see it in the mainstream image if we can't fix the real problem. I had hoped that the fix would no longer be needed courtesy of m17n, but that appears not to have happened yet.
There is a lot of legacy code not even in the image that uses underscore for assignment. Please allow this code to keep working. We should not break massive amounts of code just for legacy reasons. At the very very least, allow such legacy code to file in.
If you or anyone have a parsing hack you would like to try, e.g. to allow it in identifiers while still allowing it for assignment, a great sample set would be the 3.7 stable universe. This is 200 packages worth of Squeak content, quite a lot of which uses _ for assignment. If your idea works there without breaking anything, then it is probably okay.
The download is here:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3835
-Lex
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