[Newbies] Method category tags

[cdrick]

2008/2/25, Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg at gmail.com>:
>
>
> On 2/26/08, cdrick <cdrick65 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > In a recent post, Matthew Fulmer explained how categories work... and
> > I don't really see why they exist this way... Can someone explain me
> > (historical reason, etc...)?
>
>
> The only reason I could think of would be for speed. In the olden days,
> Smalltalk systems ran very slow, so code was often written in an inelegant
> but fast manner to get good performance.
>
> I don't believe that the categories have been refactored much since they
> were originally designed back in the 80s.

That was what I thought... and the problem about changing is as you
say squeak need to "remain compatible with the large base of code out
there"... sad reality ;)

>  Otherwise - yea, they're yuck. They would be difficult to refactor it in
> the squeak.org image because a lot of projects (namely, various browsers and
> tools) depend on their implementation.

> I'm never going to advocate integrating my Namespaces implementation into
> the squeak.org image. It would be a bad idea -- squeak.org needs to remain
> compatible with the large base of code out there, and my Namespaces
> solution breaks backwards compatibility.
> Instead, I'm making a fork of Squeak called
> SecureSqueak which will use Namespaces
> extensively.

Interesting, I'll look at it for sure :) is it squeak-E ? where can we see it ?

Thanks

Cédrick