For these use cases it would be nice to have some sort of syntax sugar as with the cascade operator, but with a chaining operator instead.
The chaining operator would send the message to the result of the previous statement instead of the original receiver as in the semicolon cascade operator (;). E.g. dict1 at: 'key1' : at: 'key2' : at: 'key3' . I selected the colon character in the lack of non-message related characters. It's only a daydream and nothing that I found very often needing, except for cases like the mentioned in this thread, extracting a deeply nested value from a JSON object tree/dictionary. ps: use the extra parenthesis, they're not that many. :) Regards! Esteban A. Maringolo 2017-04-24 14:48 GMT-03:00 Juraj Kubelka <juraj.kube...@icloud.com>: > >> On Apr 24, 2017, at 14:42, Markus Böhm <markus.bo...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> May I ask: >> What's the idiomatic way to retrieve values from nested dictionaries? >> >> (((dict1 at: 'key1') at: 'key2') at: 'key3') >> >> Are all the brackets really necessary? > > I think so, without the parenthesis, it is interpreted as one message > at:at:at: > > If you use it a lot, you may want to convert the dictionary structure into > domain objects. > > Juraj > >> >> BR Mike > >
