removeAll:

richard at simula.no richard at simula.no
Thu Aug 29 11:39:22 UTC 2002


What I have learned from this discussion:

- Few, if any, can present a complex logical argument without error or
ambiguity.
- The longer the presentation, the more error and ambiguity.
- More are driven to respond to insult than to a resonable proposal. 
Even to perceived insult.
- Richard A. O'Keefe is very good at presenting logical arguments and is
a prodigious writer.
- Important Smalltalk methods rely on the invariance of method arguments
during execution 
  but do not document or verify this assumption.
- The semantics of these methods could be defined to make argument
invariance the
  responsibility of the method implementation, rather than caller.
- Documentation of either semantics is easy.

It seems the ideal solution would not require callers of a method to
know or care how the method is implemented.  That means the burden of
ensuring argument invariance falls on the method implementation. 
Ideally, again, we would perform no useless work.  An argument is copied
only when it is known that it will be modified.  I wish I knew how to do
that...

Rich



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