Automatic selection of '--all--'

wiljo at mac.com wiljo at mac.com
Thu Dec 26 15:40:39 UTC 2002


On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 04:21 PM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Dean Swan <Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM> wrote:
>     Method Categories and Class Categories are not part of the 
> Smalltalk
>     language!
>
> True.  There is nothing about them in the ANSI Smalltalk specification,
> and the ANSI Smalltalk interfchange format has no provision for such
> information.

Reconsider your interpretation of the spec in the following context.

The first distinction of the ANSI Smalltalk interchange format is 
between
source file elements that correspond to semantic elements of a Smalltalk
program versus those which do not contribute to the meaning or operation
of a Smalltalk program. The ANNOTATION syntax provides the single
syntactic mechanism for encoding such information. Annotations are
associations with string keys and string values. There are a number of
predefined kinds of annotations that all Smalltalk implementations 
should
understand, for example: comment.

Thus, an implementation that supports class and method categories may
on file out preserve this meta data about the source as annotations. 
This
is possible, because the annotation spec allows user defined annotation
keys. From an interchange point of view, any reader may safely ignore
any annotations which are not understood without concern that the
program will behave differently when compiled or interpreted.

If you examine the ginsu module system built for Squeak World Tour
I believe you will find the ANSI interchange format was used in
precisely this way.

Cheers,
:-}> John Sarkela




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