On 5/10/12, Bert Freudenberg <bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
On 10.05.2012, at 13:25, H. Hirzel wrote:
On 5/10/12, Levente Uzonyi <leves@elte.hu> wrote:
So it's not about dynamic arrays, but arrays created with the brace syntax. And yes, that was introduced in Squeak.
Any idea when and for which reason?
Dan Ingalls, 1997: "Larry Tesler added the Curly Brace construct to Apple Smalltalk back around 1985, and there it sat in Apple's APDA (Apple Programmer and Developer Association) Smalltalk release for about a decade. Then we resurrected that image as the basis of Squeak, and I've never bothered to tear it out."
More at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/mark.guzdial/squeak/notes/curlybraces.html
- Bert -
Thanks for the link Bert, <citation> David N. Smith wrote: Curly braces are currently used in Squeak to construct runtime-evaluated collections </citation>. The question is -- is there some more documentation than just some clippings from an email correspondence? If I understand you correctly people 'forgot' to take them out and so this syntax stayed. Is it used much? Would it be possible to deprecate this usage and reuse the syntax for implementing literal dictionaries 'JSON style'? --Hannes