I think it's worth actually changing the term in the code. If Squeak has educational value, we shouldn't use a misnomer like that. Anyway, I expected "pragma" to mean what it meant in other systems and it confused the hell out of me. 

I do not, however, understand that part of the system well enough to doIt. 

On Jan 28, 2011, at 6:27 AM, Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org> wrote:

> Igor Stasenko wrote:
>> On 28 January 2011 13:59, Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org> wrote:
>>  
>>> Torsten Bergmann wrote:
>>>    
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I would like to port the recent changes made to HelpSystem
>>>> (for instance to be able to mark a method with a pragma
>>>> like <wikiStyleHelp: 'My Book'>)
>>>> This would allow to define and load help contents without any dependency
>>>>      
>> 
>>  
>>>> on the help system.
>>>> 
>>>> Unfortunately Squeak now differs (a little bit?) from Pharo regarding the
>>>> Pragma support. There is no PragmaCollector class, ...
>>>> Dont know if there are more differences, any ideas/experiences?
>>>> What about Cuis?
>>>> 
>>>> Would'nt it make sense to use a similar implementation in all worlds?
>>>> Comments appreciated.
>>>> Thx
>>>> T.
>>>>      
>>> Hi Torsten,
>>> 
>>> You mean "method annotations" right? ('Pragma' has a completely different
>>> meaning in the language / compilers that use them, and is a very bad name
>>>    
>> 
>>  
>>> for this).
>>> 
>>>    
>> Is this sarcasm? yeah?
>>  
> 
> Not at all.
> 
>> This naming used for years, and now it became not simple bad, but
>> _very_ bad name :)
>>  
> 
> A pragma is a directive to the compiler to control some detail of the code generation. Method annotations are not pragmas. Calling them 'pragmas' is misleading. This has already been discussed here. I believe the outcome of that discussion was that "method annotations" was the correct name.
> 
>>> Cuis doesn't currently support method annotations.
>>> 
>>>    
>> 
>> huh... how then you specifying a primitive(s) in method? and FFI?
>> or in same way you can say.. yeah this is not pragma , its a primitive..
>> but it doesn't makes any difference.
>> 
>> You may call it  'a method's meta-data' or any other way you like it,
>> i _dont_ care!
>> As long as the idea behind is will remain same.
>>  
> 
> I was wrong, apologies. Cuis does support method annotations, I just forgot I had integrated that code.
> 
> Side note: Squeak and ST-80 had primitives using the <primitive: nn> syntax long before anyone thought about adding "pragmas" "method annotations" or whatever. Besides, primitive and ffi calls are neither pragmas nor method annotations nor meta-data. They are a syntax for the compiler to generate executable code, i.e. they are source code. Calling them 'pragmas' or 'meta-data' is mixing two different concepts.
> 
> Unfortunately, the code calls it 'pragma' everywhere. It seems the name 'pragma' is here to stay. So, when someone comes from another programming language we'll have to explain "The word 'pragma' sometimes means a kind of procedure call (primitives, ffi), and sometimes it means 'method annotation' or 'method metadata'; but it never means 'compiler directive' to us" ...sigh...
> 
> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>