Jason Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 10:23 PM, David Mitchell
> <david.mitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  Brace notation for dynamic arrays!
> 
> So instead of:
> 
> dictionary := { $a -> 1. $b -> 2. $c -> 3 } asDictionary.
> 
> I need to type:
> 
> dictionary := Dictionary new
>                        add: $a -> 1;
>                        add: $b -> 2;
>                        add: $c -> 3;
>                        yourself.
> 
> ?  In my opinion the other dialects should adopt this or propose
> another way of doing it.

Interesting that, given yout three replies, we seem to disagree on 
everything but the usefulness of the brace syntax! :-P

I'm also very much in favor of the brace syntax.  Personally, I think a 
lot in terms of "list of things to work on", and just seeing the list is 
much simpler than having to parse a "Array with: a with: b with: c" 
method.  Granted, this is an extreme case but I mean, all I want to see 
is a,b,c and yet I see 17 (out of 20) extraneous alphabetic characters.

Not to mention that brace syntax helps keeping methods short by making 
some line breaks useless (e.g. in the previous example I'd write the 
#with:with:with: call on 4 line!).

If you want to start interesting discussion on 
ansi-smalltalk at lists.openskills.org (the 
was-ANSI-Smalltalk-now-STEP-project mailing list), you could try your 
hands at writing a specification for this extension, at 
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/step/syntax-extensions-and-corrections-non-literal-array-creation

See also http://smalltalk.gnu.org/step/step-specification-and-workflow 
for what is part of a STEP (Smalltalk Enhancement Proposal).  In this 
case you don't even need a reference implementation because Squeak and 
GNU Smalltalk already implement the brace syntax, and VW has it in a 
separate package (see also 
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/publicRepository/BraceConstructor.html 
for more info).

Paolo