Hi, @Eliot: Thanks for the clarifying answer.
I believe you might have jumped to conclusion about the intention of the question. Thomas asked a legitimate question. Without users of a method it is hard to understand its use. It does not necessarily imply that the intention is to remove it, but it does show that someone wants to understand. As far as I know, Thomas actually wants to write a test to cover that usage. I am sure that you appreciate and encourage that :). @Thomas: Thanks for this effort! Cheers, Doru > On Jan 10, 2019, at 3:11 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.mira...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Thomas, > >> On Jan 10, 2019, at 2:24 AM, Thomas Dupriez via Pharo-dev >> <pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org> wrote: >> >> <mime-attachment> > > in a stack of contexts the active pc is different for the top context. For > other than the top context, a context’s pc will be pointing after the send > that created the context above it, so to find the pc of the send one finds > the previous pc. For the top context its pc is the active pc. > > Typically the debugger is invoked in two different modes, interruption or > exception. When interrupted, a process is stopped at the next suspension > point (method entry or backward branch) and the top context in the process is > the context to be displayed in the debugger. When an exception occurs the > exception search machinery will find the signaling context, the context that > raised the exception, which will be below the search machinery and the > debugger invocation above that. The active pc of the signaling context will > be the of for the send of digbsl et al. > > So the distinction is important and the utility method is probably useful. > > Do you want to remove the method simply because there are no senders in the > image? > > If so, this is indicative of a serious problem with the Pharo development > process. In the summer I ported VMMaker.oscog to Pharo 6. Now as feenk try > and build a VMMaker.oscog image on Pharo 7, the system is broken, in part > because of depreciations and in part because useful methods (isOptimisedBlock > (isOptimizedBlock?) in the Opal compiler) have been removed. > > Just because a method is not in the image does not imply it is not in use. > It simply means that it is not in use in the base image. As the system gets > modularised this issue will only increase. There are lots of collection > methods that exist as a library that are not used in the base image and > removing them would clearly damage the library for users. This is the case > for lots of so-called system code. There are users out there, like those of > us in the vm team, who rely on such system code, and it is extremely > unsettling and frustrating to have that system code change all the time. If > Pharo is to be a useful platform to the vm team it has to be more stable. -- www.feenk.com “The smaller and more pervasive the hardware becomes, the more physical the software gets."
