On 02/01/2008, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>
> On 2-Jan-08, at 10:09 AM, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> >
> >
> > Then I went looking. CompiledMethod is a direct subclass of ByteArray,
> > and has no instance variables.
>
>
> Yes, there have been plans to fix that for years but the work to do
> (what was once a simple change) is sufficiently complicated by traits,
> existing .pr files, tool related hacks and so on that it has become a
> major change that would require considerable resources. I tried again
> last year but it just grew into too much work.
>
Btw, this is one of the biggest things what i dislike in squeak.

As CompiledMethod class comment reads:
"My instances are methods suitable for interpretation by the virtual
machine.  This is the only class in the system whose instances
intermix both indexable pointer fields and indexable integer fields."

There is a lot of dirty hacks around this in VM, around attaching a
reference to source code, around using primitive index (FFI/external
prims)..
Lot of stinking code, just to make it working properly, and very hard
to add anything new.
How this can be called a 'standard' by any means?
Are we brave enough to fix things which holding progress? Any chance?

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.