How did Pharo diverge from the other Smalltalks?
Was it a good decision?
stephane ducasse wrote:
Hello people
In Pharo (following Squeak tradition) a string is equals to its symbol
representation.
e.g.
’tintin’ = #tintin
> true
In other Smalltalk dialects this is not the case.
We have been working (sponsored by Lifeware) to support both semantics
(yes this is a kind of
daunting task and it can raise bugs).
Our objective is to help people make business with Pharo. So “simple”
cross compatibility is something that we consider e.g. to deploy
applications in Gemstone for example.
(We would love to have a Pharo compiler working on Gemstone generating
Gemstone VM bytecodes this is why we love the work of James Foster but
this is another story).
So since we are pragmatic people we could be convinced that the
semantics of Pharo is not good :)
and that by default we should use the semantics of GS or VW.
The first step is to be able to choose which one to use within Pharo
and be able to switch.
We are nearly there for Pharo 13.
The second step is to get a nice default.
And we need the help of the community for this.
Do you have any advice, arguments for and against any of the two
choices that could be put on the table to influence our decisions for
Pharo 14.
So let us know :)
Stef on the behalf of the Pharo consortium.
Stéphane Ducasse
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr
06 30 93 66 73
"If you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do
differently? ....ESPECIALLY if, by doing something different, today
might not be your last day on earth.” Calvin & Hobbes
