On 21 November 2013 19:10, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
mm.. well, i prefer that fairly common would be to pass meaningful data back and forth rather than dummy values. I don't understand... when I say "fairly common", I mean that in the C world, it seems common to use null-passing for optional arguments. I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but we don't have control over that, so...
if it would be just C world :)
Another reason for not making this default, because checking for nil is one extra check for every piece of generated code which expects pointer, and i hope you agree that while null-value is fairly common, non-null is much more common.
For that best solution, IMO, would be to use 2 methods which call same function, but one uses 'nil' in function signature (and therefore method doesn't takes extra argument), while other takes extra argument but doesn't accepts nils, for sure. Yuck ;)
but this is quite common in smalltalk isn't? Look at Canvas - good example of overusing it i.e.: drawThis: withThis: andThat: drawThis: withThis: andThat: andAlsoThis: drawThis: withThis: andThat: andAlsoThis: andAlsoThat: :) yes, sometimes it looks like unnecessary protocol bloating, but i think for our case it is well justified.
Cheers, Sean
------------------------------ View this message in context: Re: NativeBoost: Documentation Suggestion and Question<http://forum.world.st/NativeBoost-Documentation-Suggestion-and-Question-tp47...>
Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive<http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Developers-f1294837.html>at Nabble.com.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.