Chris,

I was just thinking along the same lines.
However the discussions led to a nice writeup by Andreas Raab

   'Annotations for Service Discovery'
   http://squeakingalong.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/annotations-for-service-discovery/

I think the arguments laid out there are convincing.
The 'Menu Registry' thread has to be read in parallel.

That is the next area of application for pragmas (synomym 'method
property' or 'method annotation') are the menu definitions.

It's like a second floor. Or a thing orthogonal to the regular source
code in the methods. But pragmas are still Smalltalk messages. They
are just sent used by different objects. The compiler / menu bar
builder / documentation builder or whatever.

The question in the Menu registry thread is: 'How are method
annotations for menus going to look like'.

--Hannes

P.S. I am currently checking out as what Pharo has done in this area.



On 4/28/10, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nevermind..  I'm late to this party..
>
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Yes, I do not question the usefulness of pragmas for what they have
>>> been used so far. Primitives and version control related things. I
>>> oppose to use them in addition for menu definitions.
>>
>> Hi Hannes, I agree with you.  A new non-Smalltalk construct appears
>> and we see that it starts to get used for lots of things where before
>> we would have just used plain Smalltalk..
>>
>> Can we stay with Smalltalk everywhere except where it's impossible or
>> impractical to?
>>
>>> adding
>>> entries to the menu is not possible in a clean way.
>>
>> I don't know about displaying the pictures, I just use the 'open'
>> button.  But, I do use the "services" function to add my own custom
>> application functions to the file-list.  Did you know about that or
>> are you saying that it needs improvement..?
>>
>>>
>>> --Hannes
>>>
>>> On 4/26/10, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>>>> On 27.04.2010, at 00:21, Hannes Hirzel wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Terminology is important and the terminology we currently
>>>>>> have is *extremely* confusing.
>>>>>
>>>>> And that is why I am reluctant having these pragmas 'crawl' into menu
>>>>> definitions.
>>>>
>>>> Now that's just silly, sorry. Nobody is questioning the utility of these
>>>> guys, whatever we call them.
>>>>
>>>> - Bert -
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>