Integrating the RegisteringFileList

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Tue Jan 22 19:17:05 UTC 2002


On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, ducasse wrote:

> Hi 
> 
> I'm again DNU uses when they can be replaced by plain normal coding.
> I prefer writing
> 
> URL fromString: aString
> 
> than 
> 
> aString asURL and knowing that I linking URL and String /or using DNU.

Er..ok, although that elides the issue of which is nice from the end
programmer/client POV, it's clear that that's not nice *enough* for you :)

But something's wrong here, isn't there? I mean, why should my end
programmer be so constrained? What's the alternative?

Unless you mean that asURL is just *always* wrong, for some value of
wrongness. I.e., if I had a syntax transformaer that converted these as
compile time, would you still feel that they're wrong?

I'd rather have a way of automatically delinking URL and String (via
aspects, or some such) then having myself to do the double dispatch in my
head to avoid "polluting" something!

Sometimes the #fromString: idiom seems right to me, other times an #asFoo
is clearer and fits better with my coding pattern. It certainly doesn't
*dominate* (except, maybe, in workspace/cmd-line code where
#fromString: just sucks).

But you're not offering, afaict, a solution, just a ban. Evidence suggests
that a ban isn't going to cut it. So what's the solution?

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.




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