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when changing the translator...
- To: <xtech@xxxxxxxx>
- Subject: when changing the translator...
- From: Roger Gregory <roger@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 7 Apr 90 19:14:33 PDT
...send a message describing *any* change. I just spent half an hour
tracking down someone's 'clever' conversion of uppercase class
variable names to lower case variables names. This improvement broke
a lot of the FM code translation for no apparent advantage.
If you want lower case variables, they should be lowercase in
smalltalk too. Smalltalk warns you when you first declare them, but
you can just proceed and it will accept the name.
A further problem with the fix is that it was in the instance methods
when most of mapping behavior is in the class. That made it hard to
find.
We need to keep the amount of magic in the translator to a minimum, so
please avoid magic conversion of names and such.
Also, avoid using self error: in the translator. I defined self warn:
in the translator to print a message in the Transcript the includes
the class and methodName being translated. Imagine if the C++
compiler stopped after the first error!
dean