>  The changes I propose would be almost trivial for them to adopt, and
>  might actually make their lives easier in targeting Dolphin, should they
>  wish to do so.

Yes, I agree. The rewrite engine can fix all these things.

>  All arguments in favor of preserving current behavior have been based on
>  backward compatibility - nothing on merits.

I am only saying that keeping things backward compatible in critical
position makes everything easier. Frankly, I like the solution I
proposed and that apparently other people have thought out as well.
You can use both semantics, depending on what makes more sense in your
context. And best of all, it does not break existing code. I am
missing a reason why Alan Knight think this solution is not good.

>  or Seaside, I would certainly keep Seaside going, though I suspect the
>  Seaside developers would accomodate us in trying to align the dialects.

We never forced anybody to align their dialect. If possible, we always
changed our own code. We introduced compatibility layers that porters
can fill or we simply built our own classes. I hope that we do not
have to implement our own stream hierarchy as well.

>  [*] I assume that I will write Dolphin code to export something that
>  Pharo can load.  If any of you know of a good solution to that problem,
>  please let me know.  In case you are wondering why the renaming is all
>  done in Pharo, it is because it hopefully does a better job of leaving
>  formatting in tact - D5's version of the RB is fairly hostile in that
>  regard.

The rewrite engine in Squeak/Pharo reformats all code it touches.
VisualWorks has some improvements in that area. I discussed with John
Brant and he said that these improvements are part of the open-source
refactoring browser, however the problem is that Cincom modified the
code and that the original improvements are not part of the download
on John's website. Therefor it is not clear, what code is clean and
what code is commercial.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch

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