[Cuis-dev] official operator names of ; and ::

[Martin McClure]

Hi Mark,

That's an interesting question. I can't speak to "::", since I must 
confess that I don't actually use Cuis and therefore don't know what it 
does, but I don't consider ";" an operator at all. Operators, by 
definition do some operation, and ";" serves a syntactic purpose but 
does nothing at runtime.

Most things that would be operators in other languages are message sends 
in Smalltalk. And message sends could be considered a form of operator, 
but right now I'll just talk about operators with their own special syntax.

So what in Smalltalk /does/ qualify as a syntactic operator?
Assignment ":=" does, I think.
And return "^".
And that's all I can think of.

Much of the syntax is identifiers, literals, and message sends.

The rest could be considered delimiters of various types.

"." is a statement delimiter, or statement terminator
";" I might call a "cascaded message delimiter."
""" (the double quote) I might call a "comment delimiter"
() "subexpression delimiters," perhaps?
[] "block delimiters"
|| "variable declaration delimiters"

I'm not sure I've answered your question, but for whatever it's worth 
those are my thoughts.

Regards,
-Martin

On 7/31/24 18:17, Mark Volkmann via Cuis-dev wrote:
> I understand how to use these operators, but I haven't found a 
> definitive answer to their names.
> Is the official name of the ; operator "message cascade"?
> What is the official name of the :: operator?
>
> -- 
> R. Mark Volkmann
> Object Computing, Inc.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cuis.st/mailman/archives/cuis-dev/attachments/20240731/893ebb2f/attachment.htm>