[squeak-dev] enabling read-only literals...
John Pfersich
smalltalker2 at mac.com
Fri Mar 13 07:43:18 UTC 2020
Thank the gods, finally.
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> On Mar 11, 2020, at 14:10, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I'v committed the core support for read-only objects, adapted from Clément's Pharo implementation. Enabling read-only literals is a very small step from that (three methods modified in the parser, and one method modified in Symbol class). I would like to do this as soon as possible, but it may break code. Hence my asking for permission/sending out a warning before hand. Note that the only code it will break is bad code; code that writes to literals.
>
> With the changes installed doing this:
>
> #(1 2 3) at: 2 put: 'nevermore'
>
> raises a ModificationForbidden exception with the message text "ModificationForbidden: #(1 2 3) is read-only, hence its field 2 cannot be modified with 'nevermore'"
>
>
> When we added read-only object support to VisualWorks some of the engineering staff were of the opinion that insulating customers from the change was a necessary thing, and so we implemented a preference to allow automatic mutating of read-only literals so that customers whose code did modify literals could set the preference rather than fix their code. I *really* don't ant to do this. It is a lot of complication for little gain; the right fix is just to rewrite the code not to write to literals. Note that that's as easy as:
>
> #(1 2 3) copy at: 2 put: 'nevermore'; yourself
> =>
> #(1 'nevermore' 3)
>
> since copies of read-only objects are mutable.
>
> So do I have everyone's consent in changing trunk over to read-only literals? If there are no strenuous complaints by tomorrow noon, PST, I shall effect the change.
>
> To avoid recompiling (which can produce unbound methods, etc) I shall change literals to be read-only via a pass over all literals and a pass over the Symbol table. Hence the change should be non-invasive. If your code (like probably 99.9% of all code in the system) doesn't write to literals you won't notice.
>
> _,,,^..^,,,_
> best, Eliot
>
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