At 01:37 PM 11/2/98 +0800, Matthew McDonald mafm@cs.uwa.edu.au wrote:
It looks like the main difficulty would be that the resulting language couldn't be parsed without extra information - you'd need to know whether or not there was a message called #next:bits to decide whether or not "aBitStream next: 40 bits" meant ((aBitStream next: 40) bits).
[Incidentally, that would be (aBitStream next: (40 bits))]
Knowing what method selectors exist in the image would not be enough. If there existed #next:bits, #next:, and #bits, you would not be able to tell which interpretation of "<expr1> next: <expr2> bits" was the proper one without knowing (and you can't) the types of the expression results. What's even worse, in a dynamic environment where selectors come and go, adding or removing a selector would mean potentially changing the parse tree of some of the already compiled methods.
--Vassili