[Pharo-users] Stream >> <<

[Richard O'Keefe]

I think it's fair to say that #<< *is* a bug.
There does not seem to be any coherent description of what it means.
It's overloaded to mean *either* #nextPut: *or* #nextPutAll: *or*
something else, in some confusing ways.
CommandLineHandler           #nextPutAll: (sent somewhere else)
Integer                      left shift (someone has been smoking too much
C++)
NonInteractiveTranscript     #show: = locked #print:
SocketStream                 #putOn: (which may itself act like
                             #nextPut:, #nextPutAll:, #print,
                             put elements sans separators, or
                             something else)
Stream                       #putOn: (see above)
WriteStream                  either #nextPutAll: or #putOn:
Transcript                   #show: = locked #print:
ThreadSafeTranscript         #show: = locked #print:
VTermOutputDriver            #putOn:
VTermOutputDriver2           #asString then #nextPutAll:
ZnEncodedWriteStream         #nextPutAll:
ZnHtmlOutputStream           #asString then #nextPutAll:
SequenceableCollection class #streamContents:

As was once said about PL/I, #<< fills a much-needed gap.
When I see #print:, or #nextPut:, or #nextPutAll:, I know
what to expect.  When I see #putOn:, I have in general no
idea what will happen.  And when I see << it is worse.

One point of << is to imitate C++'s composition of outputs.
That might work, too, if only there were some agreement
about what #nextPutAll: returns.  There is not.  It might
return the receiver.  It might return some other stream
related to the receiver.  It might even return the collection
argument.  So when you see
 a << b << c
in general you not only do not have a clue what (a) is going
to do with (b) but you have no idea what object the message
<< c will be sent to.

Now let's see if we can puzzle out what
Array streamContents: [ :s | s << 10 << '10' << #(10 '10') ]
does.
The output will be going to a WriteStream.
aWriteStream << anInteger
is not, but is like, aWriteStream print: anInteger.
So we add $1 and $0.
aWriteStream << aString
reduces to aWriteStream nextPutAll: aString.
So we add $1 and $0.
aWriteStream on anArray << anotherArray
reduces to aWriteStream nextPutAll: anotherArray.
So we add 10 and '10'.
Thus the result we get is
#($1 $0 $1 $0 10 '10').
What result we should *expect* from this muddle I cannot say.

If, on the other hand, you wrote explicitly
Array streamContents: [:stream |
  stream print: 10; nextPutAll: '10'; nextPutAll: #(10 '10')]
you would have an easy time figuring out what to expect.

By the way, there is no standard definition of #show:, but in
other Smalltalk systems it's usually a variant of #nextPutAll:,
not a variant of #print:.  There's no denying that locked output
is useful to have, but #show: is not perhaps the best name for it.
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