On Friday 26 September 2003 10:52, Phil Hudson wrote:
> Thanks Göran. I'm convinced.

Awww... you gave up too easily. In the Self dialect of Smalltalk (those 
of you thinking of writing me that "Self isn't Smalltalk", please don't 
bother) a context is created by cloning the method object. So any 
temporary variables should have valid values *before* execution starts.

Something like


   myMethod: arg = (
         | x <- 10. y <- 'Hubba'. z = picture from: 'FCD045F07' |
         ....
   )

The 'z' temporary variable is actually a constant rather than a 
variable, which if one thing you can't have when initializing in the 
method body instead of the declarations. Another subtle difference 
relative to

   myOtherMethod: arg (
         | x. y. z |
         x: 10.
         y: 'Hubba'.
         z: picture from: 'FCD045F07'.
         ...
   )

is that now the code for these initializations is executed each time the 
method is invoked, while in the first example they were executed while 
creating the method object. The really makes little diffence for things 
like 10 or 'Hubba', but if the picture creation method is slow then the 
first version is much more interesting.

Yes, Smalltalk has been around for 31 years now. But it is never to late 
to learn new tricks ;-)

-- Jecel