Also, more recently reported by Gilad http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=5793
2009/12/16 Lukas Renggli <reng...@gmail.com>: > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: L Peter Deutsch <l...@major2nd.com> > Date: 2009/12/16 > Subject: Re: [BUG] [ :a | ] value: 1 > To: eliot.mira...@gmail.com > Cc: reng...@gmail.com, dan.inga...@sun.com, > squeak-...@lists.squeakfoundation.org > > > Good Heavens. To think that that something like this would surface after > all these years.... > > I agree with Lukas. The block should return nil. The ANSI standard is > broken -- the fewer special cases a standard has, the better. > > I didn't write the Smalltalk source-to-bytecode compiler, and if I had, I > would have made it return nil if I had had my wits about me. > > OTOH, Dan may know of a historical reason why things were done this way -- > perhaps there's some fairly common usage pattern that I've forgotten that > makes the return-the-last-argument definition worthwhile. > > I agree that changing this is likely to break code. All the same, I am > somewhat in favor of changing it in the ANSI standard. If that is done, I > would hope someone would create a tool to do a pass over Smalltalk source > code and browse any occurrences of the problematic construct. (Fixing them > automatically might not be a good idea, since the value that the block > returns might not actually be used, and if not, no fix would be needed.) > Fortunately, this is an example where it's easy, if a little unsightly, to > write code so that it will work under either interpretation (by explicitly > include the desired return value in the block). > > L Peter Deutsch > > P.S. Writing standards is really very tricky. If one writes a standard too > early, it's likely to get something important wrong simply from not enough > experience; but if you write it too late, it may be impossible to get > implementations to follow it, or the standard may have to compromise on > quality to conform to the implementations. A depressing example of this is > HTML5, where I'm told the standards committee pretty much caved to whatever > the major browsers had actually done, regardless of how poorly designed it > was. > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > -- > Lukas Renggli > http://www.lukas-renggli.ch > > _______________________________________________ > Pharo-project mailing list > Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr > http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project > _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
