[Vm-dev] Proposal: get rid of primitive numbers

[Igor Stasenko]

On 10 March 2012 13:37, Tobias Pape <Das.Linux at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>
> Am 2012-03-10 um 12:08 schrieb Igor Stasenko:
>
>>
>> I am get annoyed by these numbers..
>> why, living in our amazingly powerful smalltalk world, in order to see
>> what the primitive does,
>> i should first lookup the selector in #initializePrimitiveTable method?
>>
>> Is it so hard for compiler to lookup the prim by its symbolic name ,
>> why i forced to do that manually all the time?
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, can anyone say (without looking into image), what
>> <primitive: 135> does?
>> And now, same question, what
>> <primitive: #primitiveMillisecondClock>
>> does?
>>
>> Never ending fight: meaningful names vs meaningless numbers
>>
>
> And while we are at it,
> Can we devise a more comprehensible variant of denoting
> the core primitives than  "Essential." in the comment
> of methods using them? (this one gave me shivers…)
>

Well this is a bit orthogonal to what i proposing.
My proposal is to change compiler & all numbered prim invocations to
be more accessible,
while yours is about better documenting of "what is a primitive".
I'm not saying that this is not important, but requires a bit
different skill(s) for the task: writing, not coding :)

> Best
>        -Tobias



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.