On Wed 08 Apr, Reinier van Loon wrote:

> Agree. It needs to be solved at VM level because you don't want to
know
> about system/platform specific details.
Sorry Reiner, but I disagree with your sentiment very strongly.
Complicated things ( and printing is often complicated) ought to be
in the image, since Smalltalk is good at handling complicated things.
There is no need for _users_ of the facility to have to worry about
the platform details, but that does not mean that the implementation
has to be buried in the VM. In much the same way that filenaming
details are handled (albeit poorly at the moment) by having platform
specific subclasses, platform specific printing can  be catered for
by having subclasses of some printing-interface class. Some parts may
involve platform specific primitives, or better yet, systemcall code
which avoids too much complication of the VM code. There need not be
any troubling image size problem if the code is dynamically loaded.

The VM is already _way_ too complicated and convoluted. Let's avoid
making it worse.

-- 
Useful Latin Phrases:- Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam
suffodiant!
May faulty logic undermine your entire philosophy!
Tim Rowledge:  rowledge at interval.com (w)  +1 (650) 856-7230 (w)
 tim at sumeru.stanford.edu (h)  <http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim>