Re: [Pharo-dev] ObjectLiterals thoughts....

Aug. 30, 2014


      On 29/8/14 11:56, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
...
Hi,
I had a quick look at the ObjectLiterals project - I must admit that I forgot most about it ;-)
me too :)
Christophe was patching STON to make it less verbose when I remembered 
that igor sent some ideas around.
...
Now that I see it again, one of the things that strikes me is that there is no such thing as a general object fallback, as far as I can see - that is a choice of course.
Note that I did answer your earlier mail about STON
http://forum.world.st/About-STON-td4772934.html
Sven
On 29 Aug 2014, at 11:35, stepharo <stepharo@free.fr> wrote:
...
Hi guys
we are looking at STON and ObjectLiterals with Christophe and for handling metadata.
And I was brainstorming.... I was wondering if it would be possible to have a bit more use of self evaluating
for example
    1@3
    #k -> 2 instead of (Association #k 123)
my brainstorming is how could we minimize new syntactic constructs and still support a literal object format.
So object literal cover that so may be this is good.
1@3 as (Point 1 3)
    and
    #k -> 123 as (Association #k 123)
So I'm not clear but this is interesting to think about it.
I would like to have also a dictionary literal syntax.... but this another story.
Stef
PS: Sven I added support for Association into the ObjectLiteral project to see how it works.
I took Igor's initial code and created a new project:
http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~SvenVanCaekenberghe/ObjectLiterals/
and I added ObjectLiteralParser to convert any Character Stream or String into a Smalltalk Literal Array and eventually into an Object.
This proof of concept moves the ObjectLiteral format/notation away from the Smalltalk compiler and will help us discuss more concretely the actual details of the specification (which is still not 100% finished).
I also added 12 unit tests and cleaned up the code and comments.
Please have a look at the code.
This is one of the tests:
ObjectLiteralParserTests>>#testMixed1
    | input output |
    input := '
        #(Array
            1
            foo
            #''foo-#bar''
            true
            false
            nil
            3.14159
            -100
            ''string''
            (#OrderedCollection 7 8 9)
            #(Set 10)
            (Dictionary
                x 1
                y 2) )  '.
     output := {
        1.
        #foo.
        #'foo-#bar'.
        true.
        false.
        nil.
        3.14159.
        -100.
        'string'.
        OrderedCollection withAll: #(7 8 9).
        Set with: 10.
        Dictionary newFromPairs: #(x 1 y 2 ). }.
    self assert: (self parserOn: input) nextObjectLiteral equals: output
I like this format, its simplicity and elegance is appealing, it offers distinctive advantages in the Smalltalk context while its slight readability disadvantage is acceptable. Like any format it is a compromise and a tradeoff, but a rather good one.
Regards,
Sven
--
Sven Van Caekenberghe
http://stfx.eu
Smalltalk is the Red Pill