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

[Panu Logic]

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> What about adding 'self' and 'thisContext' also?
> This does not make sense at all.  It wouldn't be a literal Array.
These cases differ syntactically very little from allowing false and 
true and nil.
So it does make some sense at least to me  that if you treat nil and 
true and
false specially,  you could also treat self specially.


>>  (OrderedCollection new   <-  true  <-  false  <-  #foo) 
> No, this cannot work, because by your definition you have
>
> Collection >> <-anObject
>     self add: anObject
I don't think I gave the above definition anywhere (did I?).
It's not my definition.  The definition I had in mind was

  Object >> <- anObject
   ^ OrderedCollection new add: self; add: anObject; yourself

In other words the first element of the result of
    OrderedCollection new   <-  true  <-  false  <-  #foo

would be an OrderedCollection whose 1st element is an OrderedCollection.
So yes it can work.

One-element dynamic Collections  were never the problem - simply use 
#with:. 
The above idiom is meant to help creation of arbitrary-length dynamic 
collections.
 
> .... and what about one-element collections?  Defining new language 
> elements is hard.  
As I already said, this is not about defining new elements, but rather 
to show
how we can avoid having to create new language elements and rules (treat
the tokens true,. false, and nil specially inside literal Arrays) , by using
appropriate patterns and idioms.


> The worst that could happen to this project, is to have extremely long 
> threads with no conclusion as on the Squeak list.
>
> And that's also why the STEPs are meant to categorize their own 
> discussion.  I think one-catches-all discussions like this one should 
> be  avoided actually.
I agree  we're  probably wasting the bandwidth on this.   I just wanted  
to put in 
the above  corrections, lest I give the impression that I agree.  So, 
I'm  going to 
drop this subject on this list now, unless something very interesting  
comes up.
You are welcome to have the last word on the topic, if you wish to.

-Panu Viljamaa