Dictionary initialization syntax

Scott Wallace Scott.Wallace at disney.com
Sat Jan 6 04:41:13 UTC 2001


At 12:30 AM -0800 12/7/00, Andrew P. Black wrote:
>SequenceableCollection >> asDictionary... 6/12/96 sw
>I wonder if anyone (sw?) can shed light on where this method came 
>from, and why it is part of the image?   I think that Mark had the 
>right idea when he suggested changing it, or at least renaming it to 
>something like asDictionaryKeyedByStrings.

Andrew:

I have no explicit recollection of this weirdo method or what purpose 
it served at the time.  It originated back in the very early days of 
Squeak, before it was called Squeak, before it was public, before SC 
had left Apple.

Why is it part of the image?  Just one of many things that happened 
to be in the image at the time Squeak first went out.  We always had 
various end-user-oriented experiments going concurrently with the 
ongoing work on the mainstream professional programmers' system, and 
one of them in mid 1996 was something called "HyperSqueak"; quite 
possibly this errant method was one that provided support for some 
aspect of that experiment.  The HyperSqueak classes have long since 
been stripped from the system, but some of the underlying support 
methods written for that experiment still lurk in generic classes, 
and this is probably the explanation for this one.

Already by Squeak 1.0, we were well past the point where anyone could 
reasonably make a complete, manual pass through all the methods in 
the system before a release.  Thus, various dubious things slipped 
through the cracks, and these turn up from time to time and 
eventually get dealt with.

In an update recently posted to the internal update stream, I've 
expunged this particular dubious method.

Thanks,

   -- Scott

PS:  Sorry for the delay in responding to this.





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