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Well, the obvious reason why it's remained for so long would be that the primitive number is part of the compiled method header - but why not give it a name anyway? Possibly because even in the Blue Book primitive specs a single primitive will often be used in several classes and methods (sometimes with a variable number of arguments -- naughty, yes) - see http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/bluebook/bluebook_chapter29.html .
BTW, we should have all named primitives soon - if not in the final 2.8, then for 2.9.
-- Dwight
Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
I'm interested in the historical reasons, but also in why they should persist. It would be cool to do implementorsOf when reading a primitive. Seems to me <primitiveAdd> is better than <primitive: 1>.
After all, we want to make more VM hackers, don't we?
Daniel
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