Question: Block and ST-76
Marcel Weiher
marcel at system.de
Sun May 2 12:00:19 UTC 1999
Hi folks,
just finished reading the 'Early History of Smalltalk' paper in
HOPL-II a couple of weeks ago, and now I have some question regarding
blocks and open-color keywords.
>From the short snippets of code in the paper, it looks like the
square-bracket/block notation was used generally in Smalltalk-76 to
delimit chunks of code, instead of only for delayed evaluation as it
is now. Closed-colon keywords evaluated the expression (be it a
block or something else) immediately (pass-by-value), open-colon
keywords simply passed the expression itself (generalized
pass-by-name). Is this correct?
It also seems that some of the problems described in 'Smalltalk-80:
Bits of History, Words of Advice' are actually part of the bigger
problem of dsitinguishing between names/references and the objects
they refer to when both are first class object, the same going for
proxies, collections etc. Have there been any attempts at a general
solution?
Marcel
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