Two important issues...

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Feb 16 16:54:30 UTC 2003


>
> I understand this, and so does hopefully we all. Btw, I only used "the
> guys in Berne" because I don't know a better name for you guys! :-) It
> was not meant as an "insult".

We never saw it like that :) We are five squeakers interested in 
languages.

> Ok, so this means that we should not and probably will not see Traits
> coming into Squeak core for quite some time (because even if we go full
> steam ahead there's a lot of work to do).

We will assess that soon nathanael should provide us an analysis of the 
parts
that could be fixed, replaced.

> We all want a better browser, a better parser/scanner/AST whatever and 
> a
> clean kernel.
>

For the scanner/ast if anthony builds something on top of SmaCC this is 
perfect
for us.

> Someone will have to do these things (surprise) and the parser/scanner
> stuff might already be in the pipe since I read that Anthony is 
> thinking
> in moving the new Compiler in this direction. But for the rest I have 
> no
> idea - but why should anyone be opposed to these things? Stephane has
> almost sounded as if there is a resistance in the community and AFAIK
> there is none. Again, this is probably unintentional of Stephane and he
> just wanted to tell us about your different "problems".
>
> So I think this boils down to if you want to play together with us in
> the community or not. I mean, if Traits enter Squeak as a "core" 
> package
> then it will not be "yours" anymore to do with whatever you please.

But we never had problem with that.

> But lets say we get these things fixed together. What then? I am still
> wondering about where Traits would "end up" in the different groupings
> of packages and I am still wondering what this means - is Squeak not
> Smalltalk anymore? And does it matter? It will still be some form of
> superset of Smalltalk I presume.
> ---
>
> Ok, perhaps the above thoughts weren't that structured. In short I (me,
> Göran that is) would like us to all cooperate in getting the core 
> pieces
> done right (browser, compiler, kernel) - regardless of Traits. That is
> simply about doing things right.

Exact.
for example having a visitor on an AST for prettyprinting, multiple 
syntax,
eventually byte code emition would be cool

> And then eventually I would like to see Traits enter core Squeak. I
> think this would revitalize Squeak as a tool moving into the future and
> not only being a mimic of some cool stuff people did in the early 70s.
> Seriously.

Me too. But this is why we need feedback as andreas pointed it. We only 
have 24 h a day
and too much ideas, papers to write.

>
> And I would like to feel that the people working with Traits consider
> Squeak both as the home of Traits but also as the community where 
> Traits
> grew and evolves.

Goran what is important is the synergy: if we come up with a cleaner 
stabler squeak,
then we could get a cleaner, stabler Traits model. After we can build 
academic evolution
and the Squeak Traits can stay or evolve at wish of the community.
I think that what is important is that nobody got frustrated in both 
sense.
That's why I liked the email of andreas. Right now I'm looking at how 
metaclasses property composition behaves in presence of traits but this 
does not mean that we would have to refactor everything upfront.

Stef

>
> regards, Göran
>
>
>
Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) 
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
  "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
  different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today
  might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes




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