On Nov 8, 2010, at 10:39 PM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 1:22 PM, Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> wrote:

...

...

in pharo we have hex that always returns 16rXX

$A hex '16r41'

20 hex '16r14'

Even if this is regular this is not really nice. In fact this ones should be fixed to return numbers and not strings. I do not understand why hex should return a string.

And how? Integer >> #hex would be ^self and Character >> #hex would be ^value ?

It looks like I proposed something stupid :) you are right we cannot generate 16r41 as a number. I was sure that we could do that so that I do not even check. This is strange that we cannot generate these numbers. This is strange to have things that we can only parse but not generate other than via strings. We could have something like Integer value: 65 base: 16 that returns 16r41 and not 65 and not '16r41' When I type 16r41 my mental perception is not that this is a string but this is a number I'm manipulating. Like #foo, true,.... I do not think in terms of strings just objects. Now for true, #foo this is simpler because they only have one representation. Now the fact that several objects denotes the same elementary element is just an accident. So this was fun that I could think that :).

Now my post had two topics and I would like at least to get the other fixed: consistency.

$A hex '16r41'

20 hex '16r14'

$A printStringHex '41' 20 printStringHex '14'

+1. The above definitions of hex are what VMMaker wants.

Ok I will send you a cs for squeak! Now I'm fighting with MC on something else (instead of writing a nice letter for a Phd evaluation :)

Stef