Quoting Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>: 

> Clearly, character scanning inner loop is now written all in Smalltalk, and that seems efficient enough on our computers.
> Is it a problem on Pi?
> IMHO, the thing to do would be to document the primitive as backward compatibility support only (interpreter VM)
> In case of COG, since there is no such backward compatibility anyway, drop the primitives.

Please don't drop it. Cuis is using it right now. In addition, it is not impossible to build closures (and Cog) enabled variations of  other relevant images forked before 3.8, that don't include i18n. For example, Scratch or Sophie. When I converted Cuis to closures, I did (and published) a better way to do the conversion, in the hope that others would use it to convert other images...

Besides, I think it could also be possible to make good use of the primitive for newer Squeak images, when using pure ASCII (i.e. Smalltalk code), and on slow hardware as the PI. Of course, some work would be needed for this.

> Or rewrite them to support i18n...
>
> 2013/7/21 tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org>
>
>
> > Clearing out old bug reports can be very alarming. Take this one -
> > http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=1650
> >
> > Between 3.7 & 3.8 the shape of CharacterScanner was changed in such a way that the scan characters primitive (much beloved by us ancient and gray vm hackers) cold not work. That's what, 9 years ago?
> >
> > I'm not sure what the best 'fix' is. Fix the prim? Fix the image? Drop the prim entirely from the current images?
> >
> > But really - changing  a core vm-known class so the vm doesn't know it any more? Ouch. Bad programmer. Sit in the naughty corner!
> >
> > tim
> > --
> > tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> > Useful random insult:- Has an inferiority complex, but not a very good one.

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich
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