Localizing up-arrow
Ralph E. Johnson
johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Mon Oct 19 14:42:10 UTC 1998
At 9:03 PM 10/16/98, Sheldon Nicholl wrote:
>The examples also allow me to add to the list of troubles caused
>by non-local returns: "questionable" style.
>
>>stream atEnd ifTrue: [^self]
>
>Why not just say:
>
> stream atEnd ifFalse: [...the rest of the method...]
>
>or maybe better:
>
> stream atEnd ifFalse: [self doTheRest]
>
>I think I can answer this question: because it looks terrible.
>I'll admit I've used it countless times, but almost always with
>a twinge of conscience.
Please quit feeling guilty! Using a return is definitely good style
here. Kent Beck's book "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" explains
why.
>I just want to plead that in case something like this is adopted, that
>it be done at the image level. It involves far too many operations, way
>too much intelligence for something that should be in the VM, which
>should consist of simple clean primitives only. Unwinding is something
>that a programmer may want to modify, which is another argument for
>putting it in the image.
There are lots of exception packages that work at the image level.
The only thing that required a VM hack was getting ensure: to catch
returns. Andreas Raab's suggestion that blocks containing an ^ automatically
generate a cannotReturn: lets even that be in the image. Exceptions are
faster if they are in the VM, but my guess is that they rarely need to
be fast.
-Ralph
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