Mike Klein wrote:
It certainly would be nice for the corrector to change
iszero -> isZero
but it would be nicer, still for it to correct:
expandCollection -> growCollection
or
emitFourBytes -> emit4Bytes
sort of a thesaures based corrector.
Yeah, exactly what I wanted all those years:
A Do-What-I-Mean-Not-What-I-Say approach to programming.
The ideal thing would be a syntax checker and corrector which would generate working programs even if I just rolled my head on the keyboard. :-)
I'm not saying that those little helpful tricks such as spell checking, automatic declaration of variables etc. are bad. They're actually quite useful, and whenever I'm forced to use VisualAge at a customer project I yearn for the helpfulness of Smalltalk-80 derived system such as VisualWorks or Squeak.
However, there's a limit. Software that tries to be overly helpful and intelligent soon gets in the way of getting real work done. Like the MS Word spelling checker which has bitten me more than once when it helpfully corrected an 'its' into 'ist' because it thought I were writing a german text. Giving me hints is ok, but trying to guess (incorrectly) what I could have meant is not.
So please, if you think you have a great idea that would make programming a breeze, just implement it in Squeak, and see whether it really helps. It's not that difficult. But please stop the endless discussion...
nuf said
Hans-Martin
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org