Sven I understand but it is SUPER strange to save the code in a format that does not respect the syntax of the language. I think that we should write a parser for the class definition or save category as strings. I do not want to have to explain to people. Yes and no this is not the pharo syntax. Sorry I'm fed up. Stef On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 10:25 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
On 6 Nov 2017, at 20:52, Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com> wrote:
Esteban told me that this is because he uses STON for the class definition. Now a simple question may be we could use a string instead of a symbol because this is strange to have a class definitino that does not respect Pharo syntax.
It might be a bit confusing at first sight, but it is correct, IMHO.
It is STON syntax, not Pharo.
Yes, STON is a bit more liberal with Symbols than normal Smalltalk, but it is totally consistent with itself.
STON fromString: (STON toString: #'My Strange Symbol'). STON fromString: (STON toString: #'foo-bar').
If a Symbol consists only of characters in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789-_./' then the Symbol does not need to be quoted in STON.
I see no problem there.
Stef
On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 8:15 PM, Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs@gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
On 11/06/2017 08:23 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
On 6 Nov 2017, at 17:13, Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs@gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
On 11/6/17 7:07 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
On 6 Nov 2017, at 15:43, Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs@gemtalksystems.com> wrote:
of course with Pharo's implementation of Symbol it is not practical to use asString nor type checks - things that are not necessary in other Smalltalk implementations
How so ?
What is the problem with Symbol>>#asString ?
I am not going to go to every field in the api that is supposed to be a String and add asString. There are too many places to worry about ... I would prefer that Pharo be ANSI compliant:)
It's not just Metacello.
It's an annoying issue that has to be dealt with every time a Pharo application is ported to another dialect of Smalltalk and an annoying barrier for folks running on other dialects to move their application to Pharo - in this case the bugs that are introduced by Pharo's behavior with respect to Symbols can be very hard to diagnose --
Making things harder to share code between dialects is a bad thing for Smalltalk overall -- just another reason for non-Smalltalk programmers to question the whether they should use Smalltalk or not...
And I don't need to hear about how Pharo is not Smalltalk:)
Dale
So there is nothing 'wrong', you just want Pharo to remain the same as every other non-changing Smalltalk out there.
Did I say that?
I support the direction that Pharo is going, but I reserve the right to disagree with some of the details.
This is just one detail ... nothing more nothing less ... For those of us that work in multiple dialects, it IS annoying and I take an opportunity every year or so to remind you guys of the things that I find annoying, just to keep you guys honest:)
From one perspective you are right, it makes some cross platform porting in either direction harder. Seaside has many rules to help portability. Not mixing Strings and Symbol is probably one of them.
... and as I mentioned, this problem can be one of the more annoying issues to track down, when a developer is not careful ... Honestly there are two sides to the issue ... when developers use Symbols in tests to drive an API that is supposed to use Strings (this happens the most often) things break pretty quickly and the tests can be fixed pretty easily ... but when the code itself is written with mixed Symbols and Strings, the tests might actually pass after the port, and the bugs will only show up in subtle cases ... I've hit a handful of these over the years and they are hard to track down...
But you know very well that Pharo was started so that we would be able to make changes, in any area or aspect of the system, without the burden of backwards or cross platform compatibility, even if some of these changes are taste based.
Agree with your statement -- most of the changes that Pharo has made have not been difficult to accommodate, but Symbol/String is at a fundamental level and I'm not sure that it would be "illegal" to make this accommodation --- I AM pretty certain that it would cause some short term pain, but probably no more pain (and likely less pain) than is caused by trying to move an application to a new version of Pharo:)
And I happen to like the ability to mix and match Strings and Symbols (we discussed about this before).
I won't argue with taste, it's is simply the portability for this particular problem that I am highlighting ...
Dale