[ANSI-Smalltalk] Behaviour of #collect:

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Pretty much every Smalltalk I've tried has failed this test:

	'abc' collect: [:each | each codePoint]

(or the equivalent using some non-standard replacement for
#codePoint).  It seems obvious to me that this should make
a "best effort" attempt to collect the results of the block,
just as

	(97 to: 99) collect: [:each | Character codePoint: each]

doesn't complain that an Interval can't store characters.
I have on occasion reported this as a bug and provided code to
make it work more or less as expected.

My own library has in each collection class a class method
	SomeCollection withAll: aCollection collect: aBlock
so that I could hack this particular example using
	Array withAll: 'abc' collect: [:each | each codePoint]
or even
	ByteArray withAll: 'abc'
		  collect: [:each | each codePoint].

Would adding #withAll:collect: to every class that has #withAll:
be considered a good move?

What exactly should #collect: do when sent to an object that
belongs to a class whose instances cannot hold the results that
the block returns?

By the way, this particular example was not one constructed to
break things; it's a simplified version of something that came up
in real code.