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

[Camillo Bruni]

On 2012-03-12, at 06:32, ungar at mac.com wrote:

> 
> Great idea! But let's not stop there: how about getting rid of classes, too?
> 
> - David (Don't worry if you don't get it.)

shush, damn selfers :D

> On Mar 10, 2012, at 3:08 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 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

please please please! :D

and when we're already at it: give proper names to exported methods by replaceing $: in st method names with $_ in c names;

	st: getPath: length:
	c:  getPathLength()  # totally obstructed name!
	    getPath_length_() # much better in my eyes

this would make it much easier to find the corresponding methods on ST code...
(maybe we should add some source link in the generated source code

getPathLength(....) {
	#define __FILE__ VMVMaker >> #getPath:length:
	....

best
cami