Re: multiple classes with the same name, namespaces

On 5/26/06, Craig Latta craig@netjam.org wrote:

    Spoon currently still has the old system dictionary, but I'd like to

remove it. I think we should just rewrite users of "Smalltalk at:" (probably in some automated fashion, both in situ and during method transfer).

And how do you propose to do this? The reason I posted my message was that I couldn't see any way that Spoon could implement "Smalltalk at:" and I thought that there should be a way. From what you wrote below, perhaps you want to convert "Smalltalk at: className" into "Object allSubclasses detect: [:eachClass | eachClass name = className]". This will be nondeterministic when you have multiple classes with the same name.

Instead of a system dictionary, I'd rather have some class take responsibility for each former non-class "global" variable, and use messages for access.

This is easy for non-class globals. Make them Singletons.

The problem remains, though, what about classes?

    The classes we can put in some cache collection that is known to the

compiler, but it need not be keyed. Then each class has complete responsibility for its name, and we needn't worry about other objects having out-of-sync notions of any class names.

So, you want to find a class by sequential search, asking each class for its name?

Do you want to search the subclasses of Object, or ProtoObject? Or would you rather have a separate object to be this cache? If you have a separate object, how do you add objects to it when you load a module?

-Ralph Johnson