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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