Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:05:01 +0800, Yar Hwee Boon 
> <hboon at motionobj.com>  
> wrote:
> 
> >> caveman light fire with flintAndTinder usingForFuel twigsAndStraw.
> >
> > Well.. at the very least, "caveman light fire with flintAndTinder  
> > usingForFuel twigsAndStraw" is already valid syntax now, 
> its a chain of  
> > simple message sends, no?
> 
> Aha! It was a naive question.<s>
> 
> Thanks for bearing with me. I've never gotten used to that 
> construct. Very  
> often in the code it's done with line-breaks, and I think I 
> had attributed  
> significance to those.

You mean something like

caveman
    light: fire
    with: flintAndTinder
    usingForFuel: twigsAndStraw

?

I don't know when it was invented, but Kent Beck's (fantastic!) "Smalltalk Best Practice Pattern" describes it in the Indented Control Flow pattern on page 175.

I've always figured it as analogous to doing this in Delphi:

Caveman.Light(Fire,
              FlintAndTinder,
              TwigsAndStraw);

at least where indenting's concerned.

frank


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