[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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