Thomas Porter txporter@mindspring.com wrote: I assume that my assignment of "aString := 'squeak'" merely created a variable,
If this is the case, then how do I ever assign a variable which was initialized to a literal with a new value:
aString := 'foo'. aString := 'bar'.
if the variable merely points to the literal?
Richard's reply hopefully cleared up any confusion you might have here regarding variable assignments. If you want to use a literal to initialize a variable that you want to be mutable, you should use 'copy':
aString := 'Squeak' copy. aString at: 4 put: $a.
-- Tim Olson
Hello, The last days I am thinking about lots of things in Smalltalk, Smalltalk communities, Smalltalk development environments, ... You could call this an existential problem, only that it has to do with Smalltalk, and not so much with my 'inner self'.
It's not that I am posing questions whether or not to keep on using Smalltalk. Quite the contrary: I have been using it for 8 or 9 years now, and its conceptual beauty still strikes me regularly. So, the question is not whether or not to keep on using Smalltalk, but what to do with it.
Personally, what I typically end up doing is to clean up parts of it. Every time I have to implement something, I sooner or later end up making bigger or smaller refactorings in the System itself (as well as in my code of course). While this pleases me enormously (it makes it far more conceptually esthetic), I never know what to do with these changes afterwards. Sometimes I send them to the list here, but they are not included with the base release. Note that this is no remark whatsoever against Squeak central (they already do a terrific job, for which I am very thankful); I completely understand that they have other goals and do not have the manpower to try and integrate such changes. However, the net result is that these 'ameliorations/refactorings/...' are forgotten over time.
After discussing with Stephane Ducasse (my colleague here in Bern), he created the Swiki pages to note these kinds of things. And we are in contact with John Sarkela to add to the Stable Squeak effort. But still...
Is there anything that can be done ? Am I just to overly aesthetic ? Did I overlook a special prefix that I can use to send this kinds of things in the mailing list ? Do they have a chance to be included if I make them for the latest Squeak versions ? Etc etc etc
-- Roel Wuyts Software Composition Group Roel.Wuyts@iam.unibe.ch University of Bern, Switzerland Board member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org
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