[Changes to association and friends]
Hmm, I'm not sure I understand from the below what you mean by
"rationalize". Is it just the printing?

[How to make the image use these things]
At the risk of sounding very mundane, how about trying to reformulate
this as a set of changes to the existing classes? 

[How/when to hand off to KCP]
You don't strictly have to. But they might be willing to review your
stuff which will certainly help, and have some voodoo experts that might
be able to help if magical class replacement turns out to be essential.

Daniel

"Andrew P. Black" <black at cse.ogi.edu> wrote:
> At 16:29 -0700 06/06/2003, Andrew P. Black wrote:
> >Along the way, I encountered a need to clean up the various kinds of 
> >Association, for example, so that ReadOnlyVariableBindings print as 
> >a -> b.  But that is another topic.
> 
> Ok, so let's switch topic.  I haven't been Squeaking for a bit, so 
> please be patient.  I see this as a modest contribution to the Kernel 
> Cleaning Project, and it has given me an appreciation of how 
> difficult a task KCP is.
> 
> I decided, just for fun, to try to rationalize Association, 
> ReadOnlyVariableBinding (which should probably be called 
> ReadOnlyAssociation), and the two kinds of WeakAssociation.
> 
> First I wrote some tests, which duly failed in six places:
> 
> 	with Associations, WeakKeyAssociations, and ReadOnlyVariableBindings,
> 		#one->1 is equal to #one->2
> 	with ReadOnlyVariableBindings and WeakValueAssociations, only 
> the key is printed by printOn:
> 
> I think that I know what = should do, but now I'm asking the 
> customer: how should ReadOnlyVariableBindings and 
> WeakValueAssociations print?  I am willing to believe that some 
> distinction between ReadOnlyVariableBindings and ordinary 
> associations is desirable, but I don't believe that omitting the 
> value is the right distinction!  I suggest either
> 
> 	#one->1
> 
> just like an association, or
> 
> 	#one=>1
> 
> to indicate the unchanging character of the mapping.  I claim that 
> WeakValueAssociations should print just like WeakKeyAssociations, 
> i.e., the same as Associations.
> 
> Note that storeOn: passes my tests in every case, because here the 
> actual class name is printed on the stream.
> 
> OK, so I have implemented several new classes:
> 
> 	APBAbstractAssociation #()
> 		APBAssociation #('value')
> 			APBReadOnlyVariableBinding #()
> 		APBHalfWeakAssociation #()
> 			APBWeakKeyAssociation #()
> 			APBWeakValueAssociation #()
> 
> and they pass my tests.
> 
> So now the next question is: how do I install them in my image,  that 
> is, use them to replace the corresponding classes without the APB 
> prefix.  I can't rename APBAssociation to Association, because 
> Association already exists.  I can't delete the class Association, or 
> rather, I can, but it crashes my image silently.  I would think that 
> moving Association to Undefined, and then renaming APBAssociation to 
> Association, followed by 'becoming'  all of the old Associations to 
> the new Associations might work, but I'm not clear how to do this in 
> detail.
> 
> Finally, what is the appropriate stage to hand this off to the KCP? 
> Right now I have a nice clean change set, but all it does is define a 
> few tests and some APB-classes.  If I succeed in installing all of 
> this stuff, I won't have that any more.  What would KCP like?
> 
> What's a weekend Squeaker to do?  (OK, the answer is probably to 
> start with a less invasive project.  But I plan to have a student 
> this summer work on installing the Collections that Nathanael and I 
> wrote with traits into an image *in place of* the ordinary 
> collections.  This will be a similarly invasive change, and I would 
> like to figure out how to do it.)
> 
> 	Andrew