I thought that that's what you were doing.  It is interesting that we can
invoke an arbitrary primitive against any combination of receiver args,
including one that has the wrong number of arguments.  I'm not sure what
that would do to the stack either, but I presume it will be safe.

My problem:  I don't want to have to add methods to a proxy, so that it can
be as thin in protocol as possible.  Ideally it shouldn't understand any
protocol, because it is there only to redirect sends.  Granted, there are
system requirements that it understand some protocol, at the moment.

In order to do this, yet still use the proxy Oop as the receiver, we have to
approach the proxy from the side.  We don't want to send a message to the
proxy because that would only forward the send to its target.  Therefore, I
was asking if there was a way to invoke a primitive on the proxy - with it
as the receiver as far as the primitive is concerned - without sending a
message to it.   The answer seems to be that you would have a method,
defined as a block or class-side method, that you hand-crafted to setup the
primitive call with bytecodes as if it was a message send.  So on the class
side of Object, we have

Object class>>invokePrimitive: primNumber withReceiver: receiver arguments:
argArray

    self pushObject: receiver.
    self pushArguments: argArray.
    self invokePrimitiveWithoutTouchingStack.  "Don't push a new receiver.
The one we want is there already"
    self popResult.

Mark mentioned that he can do this in a block and uses the block arguments
as the receiver and arguments to the primitive.  Now that's pretty cool!

Sorry for the confusion,
- Rob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Arning" <arning at charm.net>
To: <rwithers12 at mediaone.net>; <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 8:14 AM
Subject: Re: [Anonymous primitives?] Re: [GOODIE] Delegation and Self like
things for Squeak


On Thu, 23 Aug 2001 01:32:51 -0400 "Rob Withers" <rwithers12 at mediaone.net>
wrote:
>Bob and Mark, I was thinking closest to what Mark posted I suppose,
although
>I forgot to consider that you would have to declare the types in order to
>have multi-methods; I don't think that fits well in Smalltalk model
>(explicit types are bad - it binds early?), but couldn't it be type
>inferenced by usage?  However, the idea of using the compiler to create a
>BlockContext which is marked as a primitive is an interesting take.  As
>Stephen points out, we could setup the bytecodes by hand:
>    push the first arg as the receiver
>    push the second arg as the primitiveAdd arg
>    invoke the primitive
>    pop the stack
>
>Bob, in your suggestion, why would the stack be bloated?

I don't know that it would be, but I must admit that I don't clearly
understand the problem and offered my suggestion simply to point out that a
primitive could be invoked for any combination of receiver/arguments.
Whether it solves the problem at hand I don't know.

Cheers,
Bob

>- Rob
>
>Bob Arning wrote:
>> Object>>primitive1ForAnyObject: as
>>
>> primitive1ForAnyObject: arg
>>
>> <primitive: 1>
>
>Mark van Gulik wrote:
>> b ::= [x:integer, y:integer |
>> Primitive 1;
>> Crash "It didn't work";  /* in case of failure */
>> ] : integer;
>> Print b(3,4);