Re: [swarm-hackers] Re: Swarm, Heatbugs, and forEach loops...

[Bill Northcott]

On 11/11/2009, at 1:13 PM, Scott Christley wrote:
> This issue illustrates the fundamental question of how can Swarm support both 
> its internal collections classes as well as the OpenStep collections at the 
> same time.  I don't have a good answer for this.
...........
> A third idea is to change the Swarm's List class to actually be implemented 
> by an NSArray underneath.  Then programs using List will actually be using 
> NSArray without knowing it.  Then additional methods would be added to the 
> NSArray class so that it responds to List methods.  Then they could be used 
> interchangeably.
> 
> The last idea is probably the least intrusive but still might have quite a 
> few challenges to make work correctly.

I am sort of not keen to mix OpenStep and Swarm Objective-C variants.  I think 
models and modellers need to stick with Swarm style.  A MacOS X GUI might be 
implemented in Cocoa, but having different implementations of the core 
simulation libraries with or without openstep leeds to a nasty can of worms.   
Also why bother?

Again I see the comparison with R and its core functional programming library 
written in C but addons and GUIs using a multitude of APIs.

Bill