Maurice Rabb writes:
I agree with this. I find it "least astonishing" for a literal array to mean an array that can be built with things that are known at compiler time.
In my mind this should also work: #((65+2) $A (65 asCharacter) ('aString' size) (nil isNil)) ==> #(67 $A $A 7 true)
because everything there is knowable at compile time.
The problem with this is that "knowable at compile time" is a slippery concept in Smalltalk. Is (5 class superclass superclass) known at compile time? If the compiler replaces this expression with Number, then later on when I change my image to add a super new whiz-bang class between Number and Integer, this code breaks.
(1 to: 5) could possibly be evaluated at compile-time to be the Interval(1 to: 5), but what about the expression "(1 to: 5) atRandom". How does the compiler know what messages have side-effects and what messages do not?
Smalltalk is so malleable that very little can be considered fixed at compile time -- that's one of its major strengths.
-- tim