[ANN]A plan for 3.8/4.0... (insert drumroll here)
Avi Bryant
avi at beta4.com
Thu Apr 1 21:45:17 UTC 2004
On Apr 1, 2004, at 2:29 PM, goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:
>> - changes all the Smalltalk at: into self class environment at:
>> because that way people like us will have the possibility to
>> experiment with
>> alternatives languages and namespaces.
>
> Seems plausible.
I've been thinking about this too; one thing that I think would benefit
namespace experiments is to have a way to easily get some kind of
delimiter into an identifier - so, if for example the Scanner was
modified to parse 'foo.bar' as #(#'foo.bar') instead of #(#foo #.
#bar). It doesn't have to be a period, although that's probably the
best choice. Obviously this would break any code that didn't put
whitespace after a period, but that's hardly a common formatting style
- I don't think I've ever seen it. Since VW presumably has the same
restriction, portable code can't do that anyway.
This change would allow a few different kinds of experiments:
- doing nested namespace lookups with #bindingOf:, since you could use
dotted symbols to reference classes in another namespace
- keeping multiple namespaces inside the Smalltalk dictionary, using
dotted symbols as the keys (this might make for an easier transition,
since tools wouldn't have to be updated)
- putting cleanly namespaced selectors into a method dictionary
Thoughts?
Avi
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