Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:

> I can easily understand that for historical reasons, the chunk format 
> was a
> good answer for storage of smalltalk code. Now more than 30 years later
> we can fix the problems of these stupid strings that prevent us to build
> better tools.


This flame war went around a few (?) months ago.

Two things that haven't been mentioned since the last time are:

	1. You can perfectly well treat Squeak's format as a declarative format
if you want to.  Absolutely any file format is going to be built of
"stupid strings", you know, and you can parse Squeak's format perfectly
well.  The class "Parser" should give a good start at it.  Also, I
believe some of the various analysis tools floating around have a "chunk
parser".

	2. There is another format around that should not be ignored: the SIF
format based on the ANSI spec.  Readers and writers are available on the
Internet.


Lex