I don't think you guys see that what Lukas is proposing is not necessarily a change of the language, but a better stratification of the system. Arguments don't have to be writable in a Smalltalk program if tradition dictates they shouldn't be. But a good language platform would still support that under the hood.
Janko already pointed out that VisualWorks suggests but does not enforce variable capitalization rules. VisualWorks also supports assigning to method arguments. It's a compiler flag, and it's off by default when compiling Smalltalk methods, but you can implement a different language with different rules and still use the same code generator simply by flipping that switch. The VM supports that too, despite being much more advanced. And let me once again explain that this has nothing to do with the ability to restart a context. As long as a message is sent by computing argument values and pushing them on the stack in the sender context, and as long as there is a context reflection facility (and I can't imagine a decent implementation without one regardless of how the contexts are really managed), the debugger can always restore the original values from the sender context. --Vassili On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Stéphane Ducasse <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree and to me looks like a change for a change. > There are so much things I would like to see better in Pharo... > > > On Dec 29, 2008, at 2:51 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote: > >> 2008/12/29 Alexandre Bergel <[email protected]>: >>> Frankly speaking, I am left unconvinced that allowing argument to be >>> writable will increase the quality of Pharo. >>> >> me too. >> It would be better to keep distinction between arguments and temps and >> do not rely on implementation. >> I think that in stack-based VM , an assignable arguments could be >> problematic, because if you want to restart a method, you will be >> unable to recover original values because they are not copied in >> context but lying on stack. >> _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
