On 11/6/17 7:07 AM, Sven Van Caekenberghe wrote:
On 6 Nov 2017, at 15:43, Dale Henrichs <[email protected]> wrote:
of course with Pharo's implementation of Symbol it is not practical to use
asString nor type checks - things that are not necessary in other Smalltalk
implementations
How so ?
What is the problem with Symbol>>#asString ?
I am not going to go to every field in the api that is supposed to be a
String and add asString. There are too many places to worry about ... I
would prefer that Pharo be ANSI compliant:)
It's not just Metacello.
It's an annoying issue that has to be dealt with every time a Pharo
application is ported to another dialect of Smalltalk and an annoying
barrier for folks running on other dialects to move their application to
Pharo - in this case the bugs that are introduced by Pharo's behavior
with respect to Symbols can be very hard to diagnose --
Making things harder to share code between dialects is a bad thing for
Smalltalk overall -- just another reason for non-Smalltalk programmers
to question the whether they should use Smalltalk or not...
And I don't need to hear about how Pharo is not Smalltalk:)
Dale
