On 10 March 2012 13:37, Tobias Pape Das.Linux@gmx.de wrote:
Am 2012-03-10 um 12:08 schrieb Igor Stasenko:
I am get annoyed by these numbers.. why, living in our amazingly powerful smalltalk world, in order to see what the primitive does, i should first lookup the selector in #initializePrimitiveTable method?
Is it so hard for compiler to lookup the prim by its symbolic name , why i forced to do that manually all the time?
Just out of curiosity, can anyone say (without looking into image), what <primitive: 135> does? And now, same question, what <primitive: #primitiveMillisecondClock> does?
Never ending fight: meaningful names vs meaningless numbers
And while we are at it, Can we devise a more comprehensible variant of denoting the core primitives than "Essential." in the comment of methods using them? (this one gave me shivers…)
Well this is a bit orthogonal to what i proposing. My proposal is to change compiler & all numbered prim invocations to be more accessible, while yours is about better documenting of "what is a primitive". I'm not saying that this is not important, but requires a bit different skill(s) for the task: writing, not coding :)
Best -Tobias