[squeak-dev] terse Object concatenation

Wolfgang Eder edw at generalmagic.at
Sun Sep 19 23:27:39 UTC 2010


dear chris,
i believe that this is not possible to do in a consistent manner,
because:
string , string means string concatenation
object , object means collection creation

so it is not obvious (to me at least) what
string , object
object , string
should actually do.

and then there's the fact that strings are
collections too, so
string , $c
$c , string
have yet another set of possible meanings.

just my 2c
thanks
wolfgang

On 19.09.2010 22:53, Chris Muller wrote:
> I would like to integrate this elegant extension to the
> object-concatenation API.  Just as Exceptions may be easily
> concatenated with the #, (comma) selector, now any object may, as
> well:
>
>    object1, object2  -->  "{ object1.  object2 }"
>
> and, equally, with other collections:
>
>    { object1.  object2 }, object3 -->  "{ object1.  object2. object3 }"
>
> I find this particularly useful for user-interfaces that apply
> Smalltalk interpretation to user text input, that the user was able to
> write "lists" of items in a very terse and natural way rather than
> demanding curly-brace developer-syntax.
>
> I do not wish to reopen philosophical discussions; this is right
> in-line with the spirit of Squeak's other concatenation conveniences.
> There were no major objections when I proposed this a couple of months
> ago, and if that is still true, I would therefore like to go ahead and
> merge these 5 new methods into the trunk later this week.
>
>   - Chris
>
>




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