On 16.02.2011, at 10:39, Serge Stinckwich wrote:

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I started referencing Smalltalk idioms at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_(string_fun...) I could have focused on ANSI but have chosen Squeak/Pharo. Feel free to correct me and to complete me.

This is a very enlighting exercize, especially for pointing when API turns to be not that bright. During my perigrination, I notably noticed this:

#compare: returns 1, 2, or 3 : this is both very object oriented, very intuitive and very standard and the rest of the world is stupid, unless...

Yes, really stupid, but maybe Squeak/Pharo should align here to the rest of the world or better, remove this method. We could use comparaison methods instead: <, >, ...

It is a low-level primitive, better indeed to use those operators instead, not call the compare* methods directly. For case-insensitive comparisons you should use e.g. caseInsensitiveLessOrEqual:. If we want to provide a method that answers -1, 0, and 1 I'd leave the #compare: family alone, and instead add the operator <=> as in Ruby (which would be case-sensitive). My 0.02€ - Bert -

Incurring on the risk of appearing obvious: for the rant on the "very object oriented, very intuitive and very standard", I think we could create three symbols: #lesser, #equal, #greater, and return then instead of 1,2 and 3. my 0.0199... -- Cesar Rabak Em 16/02/2011 07:56, Stéphane Ducasse < stephane.ducasse@inria.fr > escreveu: Hi nicolas propose something and we can react :) I'm busy with project proposal, teaching and 1.2 right now. Stef On Feb 16, 2011, at 10:24 AM, Nicolas Cellier wrote:

I started referencing Smalltalk idioms at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_(string_fun...) I could have focused on ANSI but have chosen Squeak/Pharo. Feel free to correct me and to complete me.

This is a very enlighting exercize, especially for pointing when API turns to be not that bright. During my perigrination, I notably noticed this:

#compare: returns 1, 2, or 3 : this is both very object oriented, very intuitive and very standard and the rest of the world is stupid, unless...

#findLastOccurrenceOfString:startingAt: in its current form is stupid to my taste, because 1) implementation is inefficient 2) the startingAt: only skip the beginning of the string which seems odd for a rfind operation I would rather expect this kind of usage: last := aString findLastOccurrenceOfString: 'to' startingAt: aString size. lastButOne := aString findLastOccurrenceOfString: 'to' startingAt: last - 1.

The CamelCase is sometimes abusive like #includesSubString:

There is no format. I know, purists will tell me that encoding a format in a cryptic string is not in the Smalltalk spirit, but please then tell me how to specify a formatting efficiently and also remove cryptic regex encoding (a pity, it's not in trunk).

I let a few holes (split/join etc...)

Cheers