[Cuis-dev] Language constructs

[Erik Stel]

Hi Luciano,

I agree, we can’t live (happily ;-) without Character, Symbol, Number and String literals. It would be very annoying to create instances without the existing literal declarations.

I think we have the same feeling regarding {}, did not use it, but it makes code more readable in some places. Although I tended to use lazy initialised (class or instance) variables to create the instances I needed. I have the feeling it is more clear I am constructing an Array in that way. Since I do see code in which Arrays are constructed using {} which actually are more like Sets, namely to describe the set of possible/allowed values. It is then used to validate inclusion of an element within this …Array?! But the fact that an element has an index is not relevant. Maybe…just maybe…{} should have been used to create a Set instead of an Array. Seems more similar to the mathematical notation we used at school ;-).

Thx for your insight!
Erik

> On 1 May 2020, at 10:19, cuis-dev-request at lists.cuis.st wrote:
> 
> I haven’t used backticks, because in the cases that I could have used them the performance gain was negligible, and I’m constantly refactoring and changing everything so I was afraid that they might introduce weird bugs (because old instances could linger inside compiled methods).
> 
> Maybe I could live without #(), I don’t use it that much. I’m not sure it is important for the base system, tho. Same goes for $. However, symbol literals are important, and I can’t imagine coding without literals for numbers and strings, it is possible but must be very annoying.
> 
> I like {} and use it often. It is relatively new, I used to code without it, and at the beginning I didn’t like it but ended up getting used to it. It does make code more readable.
> 
> On Fri, 1 May 2020 at 2:46 PM, Erik Stel via Cuis-dev <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st <mailto: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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Erik
> 

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