[self-interest] have to get this off my heart

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Mon Dec 27 11:03:25 UTC 2010


All of my least favorite Self features have the same cause - strings or
numbers where objects would work better. Certainly annotations are a
more "proper" way of doing what was a "pun" in Self 1 and 2 using parent
priorities, but I would be happier if these annotations were full Self
objects instead of strings that have to be parsed in wierd way to
extract the information we need from them.

Another place with this problem is the parameters of fail blocks. In
fact, this made Ole Agesen's application extraction scheme a lot less
useful since primitive handling code always had to include fancy string
methods. Replacing this parsing with a small set of exception objects
would be a huge improvement, in my opinion.

The layout stuff in Morphic used to (I haven't looked since 1995) encode
stuff like left/middle/right as 1, 2 or 3. This required lots of tests
that would go away if simple alignment objects were used instead.

About the annotations, in my tinySelf 0 I just had a special constant
slot with the value for the object annotation, but never did come up
with a good scheme for the slot annotations.

-- Jecel




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