Hi andreas,
We agree then. From what I saw in ruby you have module and variable 
there and this could be pool.
Stef


On Jeudi, sep 11, 2003, at 13:29 Europe/Zurich, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Stef,
>
> What a simple yet complex question this is ;-) The fact of the matter 
> is
> that pools are both, good and bad. Pools provide one of the two ways of
> "importing" a set of names/bindings (the other one being subclassing) 
> and
> are in this way quite useful as they allow us to share a set of 
> bindings
> across the class hierarchy. In many ways pools can be seen as the 
> equivalent
> to an "import" statement with the pool defining the scope and contents 
> of
> the import (I long thought that the "poolDictionaries:" in the class
> definition should be replaced by "imports:" as the latter is a notion 
> which
> is very common in lots of programming languages).
>
> The downside of it is that pools represented by dictionaries are a 
> very weak
> concept. It quickly leads to problems if you do in fact dynamically 
> modify a
> pool (for example, removing a binding from the pool may leave a 
> dangling
> reference in some piece of code) and therefore, their status really 
> needs to
> be elevated to a "development time facility" rather than a "runtime
> facility" (quote-on-quote as this is an arbitrary distinction in 
> Smalltalk).
> Meaning that modifying pools is something that should absolutely do a 
> number
> of sanity checks if ever modified, that should absolutely record their
> modifications in the changes etc.
>
> So should pools be removed? It depends. I think that "some" concept is
> needed to share a set of bindings across the class hierarchy. Whether 
> you
> call this a pool or whether you call it a name space or a module, I 
> really
> don't care (except maybe for reasons of adoption where I would claim 
> that an
> incremental changes which mostly "interprets" pools differently would 
> be
> helpful). Removing the entire concept of having a way to import a set 
> of
> bindings seems dangerous to me.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On
>> Behalf Of ducasse
>> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2003 12:24 PM
>> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
>> Subject: Re: Need feedback on one idea
>>
>>
>> Hi andreas
>>
>> I digested a bit more my ideas and in fact having namespace to have
>> shared variables is a big jump.
>> Too big may be. May be it would be interesting to see that more as
>> module (I should read a bit ruby to see if I like what
>> they have).
>>
>> Now I was really wondering what would be cost of removing
>> Pool. I have
>> the impression that
>> pool were introduced as an optimisation and are as such a static
>> construct. What is your point of view?
>>
>> I do not remember what you did about pool recently was it a step
>> towards a possible extermination of POols :)
>> I like this metaphor.
>> Stef
>>
>>
>
>
>