Honestly, I do not like that much having a more declarative (less Smalltalksish) definition. In fact, one of the things I was always proud of showing to Smalltalk newcomers, that when they created a class, all they were doing was a "DoIt" to tell the superclass to create the new subclass. And then showing how they could copy and paste that into a workspace and DoIt. Or Debug it. ��

So..if it were for me, I would keep a Smalltalk syntax with a plain message send. Sure, a builder kind of API is better to me, like Luc proposes. Also, I do prefer too the #createAndInstall kind of message so that we can have a flavour of #createClass that only creates the class but doesn't install it into the system.��

Cheers,

On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 3:25 PM, Luc Fabresse <luc.fabresse@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Following Pharo Days, I brainstormed about some possible class definition syntaxes.

What I have in mind:

"basic mechanics, only THIS one in the image!"

ClassDefinition new

superclass: Object; "optional. If not specified, Object by default ;-)"

name: #A; "optional and create an anonymous class if not specified"

instVars: 'a b c';��

traits: {TEquality};

package: 'Plop';

createClass. " this message sent might be hidden by the browser when accepting"

"---------------"

"Some IDEAS (but I did not find one that I really like) of scripting/shorter syntaxes that must ALWAYS end up calling the above basic mechanics at the end:"

Class fromDefinition: [ :def |

def name: #sub;

instVars: 'w r g';

superclass: Object ].

Object subclass ��"<-- returns a subclass of Object but the problem is that the new class is muted

(btw, I assume you mean mutated.) ��

��

each time and the class definition is not explicit"

name: #A;

ivs: 'a b c';

traits: { TEquality }.

What about...

�� ��Object subclass: [ :def | def

name: 'MyClass' ; �� �� ��"optional and create an anonymous class if not specified"

instanceVariables: 'a b c' ;

�� �� �� �� classVariables: 'M N O';��

�� �� �� �� classInstanceVariables: 'x y z' ;

traits: {TEquality} ;

package: 'Plop'].

�� ��Object>>subclass: builderBlock

�� �� �� ��^ (builderBlock value:��ClassDefinition new)��createClass

�� �� ��

or similar to Guille's declarative proposal...

�� ��Object subclass: {

�� �� �� ��name: 'Myclass',

�� a: InstVar,

�� b: InstVar,

�� �� �� c: InstVar

�� ��}

cheers -ben

--

Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com