[squeak-dev] [Squeak 4.1] Collections: Failure of Concatenation Operator

Peter Kenny peter at pbkresearch.co.uk
Mon Oct 25 21:51:48 UTC 2010


Hello All

I'm not sure if this is the right place to raise this, but at least this is
an active group, so perhaps someone will give me a steer if it is not. I
have mentioned it in Mantis, but the message numbers there make it seem that
I am the only person posting there and nobody seems to be reading.

Squeak 4.1 has a method String>>, which does not exist in earlier Squeaks.
>From the method comment, it is there to allow a concatenation of a String
with something which is not a collection; the example quoted in the comment
is:
       Transcript cr; show: 'The value is: ', 3.
which is illegal in earlier Squeaks, in Pharo, in Dolphin and in Smalltalk/X
(I haven't checked others). The problem is that allowing it causes a failure
in concatenating a string to an array of characters; in my case the
construct was ('/', Character separators), which was used to generate a
collection of terminators for String>>findTokens:. As a result, an
established Squeak package (Todd Blanchard's HTML and CSS Validating Parser)
does not work 'as is' on Squeak 4.1.

I have discussed this in Mantis, and proposed two solutions: either get rid
of String>>, (because what it allows should be illegal) or modify it so that
the case where the argument is a kind of SequenceableCollection is dealt
with as in earlier Squeaks.

I have checked the latest Squeak 4.2 alpha that I can find, and the problem
is still there. I have gone through the list of posts in this group which
mention collections, and I cannot find a modification affecting this. If it
has been dealt with, my apologies. If not, it seems a good idea to look at
it before Squeak 4.2 is released.

My Mantis posts can be found at
http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7564

-- 
Best wishes

Peter Kenny 
-- 
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