Hi Marcel,

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Marcel Taeumel <
marcel.taeumel at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de> wrote:

> At the moment, programmers can do three things with message categories:
>
> 1. Define their name.
> 2. Define their content.
> 3. Define their order.
>
> Naming is already difficult. Finding the right place for a message can be
> challenging, too.
>
> The thing is that order gets messed up pretty quickly. For example,
> extension categories just popup somewhere in between depending on the
> projects you have installed.
>
> My general impression is often that those categories just have *some* order
> and *want* to be alphabetized to make any sense out of it. I am not sure
> but
> w/o describing the intent of an order, it may just appear bogus to a
> programmer.
>
> Personally, I am really happy with anything that I do not have to organize
> or care for. Message category orders are such a thing. :-)
>
> But don't get me wrong: I don't want to push my personal expriences onto
> everybody. Let's discuss it here. ;-)
>

Personally I find ordering of protocols really helpful for productivity,
especially with  complex classes such as the VM's interpreter classes.
These are >100 method classes.  I do things like put all the
bytecode protocols, stack bytecodes, send bytecodes, return bytecodes, etc,
next to each other (which of course doesn't work with alphabetization
unless one rewrites to bytecodes-stack etc).  I was /mortified/ the first
time I loaded VMMaker into a clean image because Monticello *does not
record protocols order*.  I wish this would be fixed.  I find myself
alphabetising and then, for certain classes, such as the interpreter,
carefully putting things in order.  This is wasted effort. Monticello
really should preserve order.  I have no objection to a preference that
tells the browser to display protocols alphabetically.  Please don't make
it the default.  When we did this for VisualWorks (I think it was Vassili
Bykov) we ordered initialize protocols at the top, private protocols at the
bottom, and everything else in the middle.



>
> Best,
> Marcel
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://forum.world.st/The-Trunk-Tools-mt-534-mcz-tp4808262p4808408.html
> Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>


-- 
best,
Eliot
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