Re: [Help-smalltalk] criticism of the new syntax

Re: [Help-smalltalk] criticism of the new syntax

[Paolo Bonzini]

First of all, thanks for the constructive criticism.  Some changes to 
the syntax will definitely go in post 3.0 after we get user feedback, so 
your message is definitely valuable.

> 1, too much indention. I don't think the java-ish whole-class-as-a-block 
> syntax is a very good idea for all but the trival classes. Indention doesn't 
> really help for long blocks.

I agree, but on the other hand editors are much better at finding 
headings for indented scopes, and indented scopes support features such 
as folding (which I don't use, but other people do).

Also, most languages (Java, Python, Ruby) are doing 
whole-class-as-a-block, and the main objective of the new syntax was to 
make the language reasonable to people familiar with those languages.
  > 2, Now I need to have a category pragma for all the 3 line long 
method? With
> the old syntax casual smalltalker like me don't need to know about pragmas at 
> all; besides I think pragmas look ugly by themselves.

I think most newcomers won't use the category pragmas at all.  I still 
hope that one day the file-based syntax will be editable with a browser.

> Person >> category: 'printing' [
> 	printOn: aStream [
> 		...
> 	]
> ...
> ]

Yes, that's nice.  Unfortunately, I thought of it as well as of permitting

Person >> new [
     <category: '...'>
]

at toplevel, but they would not be easy to implement in the current 
parser.  However, based on you proposal, something I could do pretty 
easily is this:

     Object subclass: Person [
         | name age |

         Person class >> category: 'instance creation' [
	    new [
		    ...
	    ]
             ...
         ]
     ]

What do you think?

Paolo

Re: [Help-smalltalk] criticism of the new syntax

[Paolo Bonzini]

This was obviously meant for only one of the two destination lists. 
Sorry. :-)

Paolo