[Cuis-dev] Language constructs

[Phil B]

Erik,

On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 3:46 AM Erik Stel via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> Maybe I wasn’t clear (because it was part of another topic, see below) or
> tread on a sensitive subject, but I’m still eager to hear the reasoning for
> having backticks (which are not in Squeak nor Pharo) from the simplicity
> point of view. Would anyone care to elaborate?
>
>
Years ago I noticed that we had a lot of pointless dynamism in the image
especially since moving to local coordinates (i.e. we had 0 at 0 all over the
image.)  In an attempt to *not* extend the language,  I proposed Point
class>>zero for effectively a singleton 0 at 0 instance.  Juan surprised me
and effectively said 'I don't like that, let's go this way instead' (i.e.
backticks).  It was a pretty elegant and minimal solution so I didn't have
a problem with it at the time and it has definitely grown on me.  While
addressing 0 at 0 was the initial motivation, it is useful anywhere you want
to create ad hoc literals.  I use it a ton and only wish we went a little
further and had a full macro system in Smalltalk ;-)

As far as compatibility with Squeak and Pharo... well that's extremely
problematic IMO.  Pharo changes things all the time (and not always for the
better) seemingly based on the weather.  So any attempt to keep in sync
with it would mean breaking Cuis whether or not we thought the change was a
good idea.  Squeak has the opposite problem: it doesn't change much at
all.  To some, this is an asset, to me it's a liability: I don't mind
working with an obscure/fringe language, I do mind working with a dead
language.  To me, Smalltalk-80 was great 40 years ago but should not be the
final stop in language evolution.


I am also eager to know what others think about language constructs such as
> #(), {} and `` for daily usage. And I mean this in the sense ‘Do you use
> these often? Could you live without them?’. I do understand how they can be
> used and what their meaning is ;-). And I can also lookup their current use
> in the default image, but that does not answer how you/we use them in our
> (application) code.
>

I tend to use {} more than #(), but I do use both of those as well.  My
only gripe is that all of the damned brackets have been used up by
Smalltalk (as most other languages do as well)... I really would have liked
to have at least one set of brackets that were available for 'user-defined'
purposes but, oh well.


>
> Kind regards,
> Erik
>
>
Thanks,
Phil
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