Hi guys,

Am I the only one who finds the ruby protocol for accessing
collections richer at times? In Smalltalk, if ary is an array, how do
I get ary without its last element?

In Ruby, it's dead easy: ary[0..-2]. I can do that by heart after not
having done any serious Ruby in a long time. In Smalltalk, I have to
search through a long list of method names, because there are just so
many possible names for the method.

The point is: would it be totally out of reach to try and get a more
concise and unified way to access sequenceable collections?

I know I'm sort of asking for the slaughter of a holy cow: Smalltalk
only has telling and easy message names all over. Or wait, does it?
There's of course Class >> #methodName. And 2 @ 3 for points.

Just to put something on the table, how about:

(ary at: 1, -2)

Or, without braces, if you don't mind the reversal:

1,-2 @ ary

Or, consistent with current naming conventions:

(ary from: 1 to: -2)

Just my 2 cents, what do you think?


Niko
-- 
http://scg.unibe.ch/staff/Schwarz
twitter.com/nes1983
Tel: +41 076 235 8683

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