Example A-SIGNATURES Re: A Way to express Standard multi-argument Method Signatures in Smalltalk Re: [ANSI-Smalltalk] Next STEPs

[Eliot Miranda]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Paolo Bonzini <bonzini at gnu.org> wrote:

> Eliot Miranda wrote:
> > To be even more blunt I think the standards process would be damaged if
> > it is used as a way to introduce experimental extensions into the
> > language.  I can imagine that attemting to standardise method pragmas
> > would be contentious enough given that theyre supported by only three
> > dialects to my knowledge, and then in different ways, even though
> > they're of proven use.  But attempting to standardize something that
> > isn't in the base of any dialect is going to cause discord.  IMO, the
> > time to standardise some new feature is when it is well understood, has
> > proven its utility in practice and has a functional supporting ecology
> > (tools etc).  A-SIGNATURES doesn't meet any of these criteria.
>
> IIUC, these "A-signatures" are just a way to hijack cons cells as a way
> to describe method signatures (and using chains of Associations as cons
> cells is often done in Workspace experiments -- I remember seeing it
> from you even while working on AOStA...).  So I can imagine a "real"
> class MethodSignature to accept an "A-signature" as a shortcut, and this
> was the usage I envisioned in my previous message to Panu.



OK, I misinterpreted.   I i were looking for a shortcut I'd use literal
arrays thus:

#( Message >> forwardTo: Object withArguments: Collection ^ Object)
#( Message class >> selector: Object ^ Message)
#( Integer >> >> Integer ^ Integer)

etc, so we still have infix selectors.  So the receiver type is the token(s)
up to the first #>> and the result type is the token(s) after #^.

However, for the sake of "writing STEPs" I agree that we should use the
> protocol system used by the ANSI standard.


Yep.


> Paolo
>
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