I was actually curious about this in Ruby as well, since Ruby also doesn't
have the Smalltalk message syntax.
I figure that the magic behind it is that Smalltalk takes strings like "dict
at: 'foo' put: 'bar'" and evaluates them into a JavaScript equivalent of
"dict['at:put:']('foo', 'bar')".
Basically, my proof of concept(I cheated with regex to cut time):
'use strict';
var Dictionary = function Dictionary() {
this.dict = {};
};
Dictionary.prototype['at:put:'] = function(index, value) {
this.dict[index] = value;
};
Object.defineProperty(Dictionary, 'new', {
get: function () {
return new this;
}
});
function st_eval(str) {
var x = str.match(/(dict)\s+(at):\s+'(foo)'\s+(put):\s+'(bar)'/);
var target = x[1];
var callName = x[2] + ':' + x[4] + ':';
var argv = [x[3], x[5]];
var realTarget = eval(target);
realTarget[callName].apply(realTarget, argv);
}
var dict = Dictionary.new;
console.log(dict);
//dict['at:put:']('foo', 'bar');
console.log(dict);
st_eval("dict at: 'foo' put: 'bar'");
console.log(dict);
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