Hello
Dominic Fox
dominic.fox1 at ntlworld.com
Sun May 18 12:16:52 UTC 2003
What a fantastically comprehensive (if not exhaustive) set of answers. Thanks
especially to Stephane for the book links.
Mention of the strategy pattern, factory methods etc. confirms something i
started thinking when I started playing with class methods, namely that some
of the GoF patterns make a kind of intuitive sense in Smalltalk, more so than
they do in C++. I've read objections to _Design Patterns_, particularly from
the FP corner, which basically argue that the implementation code for many of
them is a kind of boilerplate that ought to be abstracted into the language
itself ("you wouldn't need to write this over and over again if your language
supported proper macros / higher order functions / closures / continuations /
whatever"). These objections seem more pertinent when you look at the C++
code than they do when you look at the Smalltalk code, which is generally
more concise and less contorted.
The idea of coding support for auto-accessors into the browser suggests that
Smalltalk *does* give you macros, after a fashion; although you could argue
that, in that case, so does VB with its IDE add-ins. It surely helps, though,
that the Smalltalk syntax is so minimal (VB's is a dreadfully inconsistent
clutter). I'll have to look into this some more...
Stephane's explanation of why "^ super new init" works tallies with what I'd
been able to figure out by browsing over Kernel-Object and Kernel-Classes.
Just having the system visible in this way certainly helps: I've spent all of
two afternoons with Smalltalk so far, and already a lot of things are
dropping nicely into place.
thanks again to all - I'll be back...
Dominic
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