[KCP] SystemDictionary cleaning: Comments and design

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Tue Jun 17 02:40:37 UTC 2003


> I would also like to hear his view about globals holding onto instances
> of a class. Like "Smalltalk" holding a "SystemDictionary" and
> "Transcript" holding a "TranscriptStream".
Here's mine; having a singleton global strikes me as a bit pointless so
gues I'd prefer for example to see a class called Smalltalk than a
global called Smalltalk and its class SystemDictionary. On the other
had, we can have many TranscriptStreams and so a generally accessible
global Transcript is perfectly sensible.

and from earlier mail:-
>- "System fullNameForChanges:" is simpler than "Changes fullName:"
>- "System fullNameForImage:" is simpler than "Image fullName:"
>- "System listBuiltinModules" is simplar than: "BuiltinModules list"
>- "System listLoadedModules" is simplar than: "LoadedModules list"
Whilst I just about agree that having a class for Changes and one for
Image is ok I really think that it is going too far to have
LoadedModules and BuiltinModules. Those are examples where the mapping
simply doesn't make sense. Something more like Image loadedPlugins and
Image builtinPlugins would be a little more approachable.

I know classes are pretty lightweight but let's not go down a path that
ends up with One class and Two class and FortyTwo class etc.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: IAI: Ignore All Instructions



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