Pragmatic Squeaking (was Re: SqueakFoundation; get off your butts you lot!)

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Sun Jan 20 02:34:27 UTC 2002


Bijan Parsia wrote:

> Here's a 45 minute or more shot at a simplistic conversion:
> http://www.unc.edu/~bparsia/squeak/squeakfromrubyintro.htm

Very cute - I have to say, it's quite surreal to have it kept in the first
person, as I can hear Dave's voice in my head as I read it, except that
the words aren't (quite) his.  One nit to pick - you wrote

  "access the first element"
  a at: 0  » 1
  "See! A message send, unlike that nasty Ruby!!"

What do you think it is in Ruby?  Pointer arithmetic?  a[1] sends the []
message to a.  It's syntactic sugar, sure, but I've even seen a goodie
for squeak that allows exactly the same sugar; semantically it's identical
to #at:.

Maybe someone really should try such a conversion (with Dave and Andy's
blessing, I hope).  As both a Rubyite and a Squeaker, I wouldn't mind
seeing a lot more collaboration between the two communities, as I think
they have a lot to learn from each other.

Cheers,
Avi




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