[self-interest] simplicity

[Brian Rice]

On Jun 28, 2004, at 12:55 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:

> Michael Latta wrote:
>
>> If I can paraphrase your position:
>>
>> Reference counting is more deterministic when releasing resources that
>> have semantics beyond bits in memory.
>>
>> I would agree with that statement.
>
> More generally, I would argue that Smalltalk/Java/Self rely on the
> programmer for deterministic resource release.

I don't really care to get into this (read: reply to further posts in 
the same vein), but this seems truly ill-informed about Smalltalk or 
any language with extensible syntax and blocks (Ruby). I can define:

FileStream class>>named: filename do: aBlock
| file |
[file := FileStream open: filename.
aBlock value: file]
	ensure: [file ifNotNil: [file close]]

and use it as such:

  FileStream named: 'foo' do:
    [:file |
    self doSomethingWith: file.
    self doSomethingElseWith: file]

So now, we're not just talking about closing the file, but opening it 
as well, with the VM supporting ensure: semantics so that the finalizer 
is just a fallback. With ensure: or mechanisms like it, you can /alter/ 
your blocks into C++-style blocks without having to architect language 
support for it, or limit your block semantics to stack-allocation 
limits of semantics.

I am always suitably impressed by the number of people on this list who 
like Self but don't have a firm grasp of its much broader basis, 
Smalltalk-80. Self has quite poor libraries and as such is a 
demonstration and not a system that should be considered on its own 
unless you cite Smalltalk and really understand it.

--
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/