On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 01:34  PM, Stephen Pair wrote:

> Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>> Hi anthony
>>
>> If you want by any chance that the blockclosure gets accepted in the
>> Squeak kernel
>> as I would like. PLEASE do not mix research ideas with that. Fix all
>> the problems you know
>> or others know (decompiler....) first
>
> I kind of agree with Stephane here.  I *really* would like block
> closures in Squeak.  But even the stack optimizations that are in VI4
> concern me a bit.  It seems like that goes too far into the research
> realm and jeopardizes the acceptance of the work done on block 
> closures.
> Everyone knows what block closures are and why they are needed; there 
> is
> a much greater chance of them getting into the base VM if they don't
> come with extra stuff that's less well understood and proven.
I pretty much agree with this; I'd much rather get functioning closures 
into the system with absolutely minimal VM changes and accept even some 
performance hit if necessary (and remember I probably live with the 
slowest machine of any of us) and then do VM changes for performance 
later. Although Anthony's work on a linearized stack is very good I 
still feel most uncomfortable having it in the image rather than the 
VM. LPD taught me "you can cheat but don't get caught" and it feels 
like having been caught.

tim
-- 
tim at sumeru.stanford.edu