Adrian,

Fair enough, but some house cleaning is also in order, and it *will* break some 
external code.  If we fail to do the right things, we will have just another 
failed fork.  Do the right things, and people will do right things to their 
code to get the benefits of a successful open Smalltalk.  Just my 2 asCents.

BTW, I *think* you will find that anyone wanting to fix external code can 
simply grab an image with it, use the what ever transformations we end up 
defining on their code (installing the RB might be a challenge??), export the 
fixed code, and file it into Pharo.

Bill




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/30/08 12:17 PM >>>

On May 30, 2008, at 15:37 , Damien Cassou wrote:

> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Adrian Lienhard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  
> wrote:
>> Have you verified that your change does not inadvertently modify any
>> behavior? Its not likely, but changes like this can introduce  
>> subtle bugs.
>> For instance, Matrix overrides readStream. So if there exists any  
>> use of
>> "ReadStream on: aMatrix" that is there to bypass the overridden  
>> behavior,
>> the code will break.
>
> It should not break anything (if it does, the test will fail and I
> will fix things :-)). In fact, ReadStream only deals with
> SequenceableStreams so it should be ok. Do you agree?

No I don't agree. Because it is not likely that there is a test for  
Matrix that will show a potential bug. I just wanted to point out that  
it is important to precisely look at the effect of such "global"  
transformations. (E.g. like Edgar tried to replace all #== with #=  
IIRC ;)

With your proposed change, I think it is unlikely you will break  
anything, but you cannot say for sure without detailled *manual*  
checking. The difficulty is that you theoretically needed to verify  
that there is never passed a Matrix instance to "ReadStream on:".

Also to consider with such changes is that you may break external code  
that you don't know of. To sum up, I'm not against such improvements  
at all, but they have to be done carefully, i.e., the argument that  
tests will show any problem does not hold.

Cheers,
Adrian

> -- 
> Damien Cassou
> Peter von der Ahé: «I'm beginning to see why Gilad wished us good
> luck». (http://blogs.sun.com/ahe/entry/override_snafu)
>
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