Re: [Help-smalltalk] [RFC] New Smalltalk syntax v2

[Paolo Bonzini]

> I did not see any discussion of the alternative I proposed, see the
> details here:
> http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A--RFC--Smalltalk-scripting-syntax-p9406679.html

Uh, I thought I had answered that.

I don't like it because, ironically, I like ''' very much.
But while you propose adding a useful syntax element, at the
same time you make it inaccessible to the methods themselves
(no, escaping is not a solution).

> Note also that this approach opens up the system for alternative
> syntaxes. Such as:

That's a property of ''' in general, not tied to your proposal.
With pragmas you could write a method like:

unsafeFastAdd: y
   <cCode: '''
      printf("unsafeFastAdd called\n");
      // the following code may crash the VM
      // if the arguments are not small integers
      // no testing is done for performance reasons
      // which is probably really not very wise in the long term.
      // But if you can't crash it, you're not doing the driving. :-)
      return int_to_st(st_to_int(x) + st_to_int(y));
      }
  ''' safetyLevel: #mayCrashVM>

Paolo