[Vm-dev] Re: adding external plugins to Squeak 4.2 on the Mac

[Igor Stasenko]

On 19 July 2011 09:55, Stefan Marr <squeak at stefan-marr.de> wrote:
>
> Hi:
>
> On 19/07/11 02:59, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>>
>>
>> How about a command-line argument that prints/answers a system attribute?
>>  The system attributes are just strings, so they can be printed without
>> loading an image etc.  It won't look as nice as myvm -printProxyversion,
>> it'll look like myvm -sysattr 1010 -sysattr 1011, but it'll be general.
>
> Since I am currently again frustrated with 'someone else system', please
> keep in mind that 'Sunday programmers' like me will understand
> -printProxyversion without needing to search for it on the internet, but
> sysattr 1011 is not directly useful, except if the command-line would also
> provide a mechanism to translate that code to something understandable.
>

Same for me. I don't see why it needs to be obscure, if we can use
symbolic names instead of numbers.
After all, we making these interfaces for humans, not for machine.

We have different positions on that with Eliot:
Eliot  adding new numbers by extending existing interface (to access
the system attributes).
While i think that it would be better to have primitives with
corresponding names, which explaining what attribute value it
returns and what it serves for.

IMO, saving developer's time is much better than saving few bytes in
VM binary (because of using numbers instead of name).

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.