At 02:42 PM 10/2/2001 -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
>...
>Might well be (incidentally, do you have pointers to these proposals)?!

I always liked Brian Wilkerson's proposal: 
http://www.smalltalksystems.com/publications/varargs.pdf

>  But
>then again, I need to ask if abandoning {} has helped in any way to solve
>this problem. As far as I am aware there's still no Smalltalk system that
>has variable length arguments. So again, is there a point in abandoning a
>useful construct if no alternatives are provided?! ;-)

The ANSI discussions were in the context of adding {} as a new feature as 
none to the commercial Smalltalk implementations supported it. One of the 
considerations was that once you add a feature you have to assume that it 
will never go away.  The ANSI committee options were essentially 1) add a 
feature ( {}'s) that might encourage poor coding practice, 2) add an 
untested feature (var args) to the stardard, 3) add nothing.  As you would 
probably expect, the committee chose alternative #3. A standards committee 
is not (appropriately so) a very good place to try to innovate.

Allen