Mariano,

As much as I don't like to adopt the position, all too common in other forums, 
that "you can't do that because I think it's ugly," I am forced to agree with 
Lucas.  It's not that I care whether or not *you* have underscore assignments 
at your disposal, but having both really would be a broken mess.

Is it simply that you want to type _ and get :=?  YEARS ago, I offered a near 
optimal solution to the problem.  Never did I hear anyone say they wanted _ in 
their sources; they wanted to see a back-arrow, and they especially didn't want 
type the extra character.  So, the fix is obvious: an *optional* editor feature 
that hijacks a key (probably _), inserts :=, and when the option is set, 
deleting = takes with it any preceding :.  Then one has "underscore assignment" 
with the reduced typing and the compiler and sources are never burdened with 
the ambiguities that can arise, and the hijacking of _ is optional for those 
who do not want it. 

If you want to simultaneously load code with and w/o underscore assignment, I 
agree with Lucas that you really need to fix the legacy code, maybe in a 
separate image(??) and then load the fixed code.

Am I missing something?  I'm trying to be helpful and honest at the same time.

Bill



________________________________________
From: [email protected] 
[[email protected]] on behalf of Lukas Renggli 
[[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 2:16 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Benjamin Van Ryseghem
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Still more problems with underscore

> Hi guys. I still have problems with underscore in Pharo 1.3. I want to use
> underscore in both ways: in selectors and as assigment.

Who would tell the system what you mean?

> If I do: Scanner allowUnderscoreAsAssignment: true.
> then it works in selectrs but not in assigment.
>
> If I do String allowUnderscore.
> then it works for assigment but stops working for selector.

This is the point of the design. Maybe the prefix "allow" is not quite
revealing enough, because you cannot have both.

You load the old code with the setting set to true. You fix your
broken assignments and you switch to false to use underscores.

Squeak has decided to go another way and allow both cases kind of
simultaneous. What a broken mess!

Lukas

--
Lukas Renggli
www.lukas-renggli.ch


Reply via email to