On Apr 17, 2014, at 1:54 PM, Eliot Miranda <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think this is right. Yesterday Clément and I had lunch with Dan > Ingalls and we talked about the origin of blocks. At first blocks were not > even real objects; instead they were just a syntactic construct for delayed > evaluation. Over time the original Smalltalk team found they needed more and > more useful features, and they wanted everything to be objects so they > introduced both the syntax for blocks and the class BlockContext, but they > didn't look at other languages and so they didn't implement blocks as > closures. > > So I think its more accurate to say > Over time Smalltalkers found blocks were /really/ useful. Later on they > found out that they could implement blocks as closures, with the result that > they were even more useful and much cleaner, leading to a more efficient > virtual machine. > > But ok, this is not a pressing thing. Was just a tough. That historic connection is really important. I love to hear grey haired people’s advice :) Thanks a lot for sharing it here Eliot. > If it ain't broke don't fix it. +1 sebastian o/
