To me #asString is meant to be used when you need an object with the String protocol. As mentioned it looks like the seaside #asString and #greaseString are meant for displaying which causes the confusion but I’m not sure why #displayString was removed apart from the obvious reasons of trying to cater for common denominator across Smalltalk dialects.
In my codebases I also tend to use #asString for displaying but have tried to move to a #displayString and #displayOn: protocol for these purposes. Regards Carlo On 03 Jan 2014, at 1:24 PM, Otto Behrens <[email protected]> wrote: > #printString and #printOn: protocol should be used for printing and #asString > for conversion. This implies that #asString should not depend on #print > protocol. Ah, I used it the other way around: printOn depends on asString. I saw 'conversion' as the lower level. Why do you distinguish here between conversion and 'printing'? Especially if displayString is being replaced with asString - to me that sounds against your thinking in principle. > If we are going to use #asString to mimic #displayString (instead of as a > conversion method) then to me #asString should be viewed at a higher level > abstraction than #printOn:. If not then we can run into these issues when > calling the higher-level abstraction from a lower level in the same objectt, > as you mentioned. Calling #printString from #asString from an API perspective > should not cause issues (as displaying something is very different from > converting something) so I’d say this is an API design problem. Yes, I think the API could be clearer. So this becomes the essence of the question here: What is the meaning of these methods from an API perspective? Thanks for the response
