Sorry Christoph, I'm not a fan of this one. IMO, such an abstraction isn't worth poaching such a common word, #article, from availability for applications and expanding Squeak's core API with it, especially for something of such limited use. Many objects already care enough to provide their own #printOn: anyway (sometimes not even calling super). There's no multilingual hook here (not that there should be one, for this I think there shouldn't) since, even if it *was* possible to replace regular Strings with one's own subclass, that isn't how one would handle internationalization in Squeak.
Instead of adding code to increase printing of type information, the abstraction *I* like for #printOn: is one that could *exclude* the printing of it entirely, and assures a *terse, one-line* print (like, < 80 characters) which identifies the object to the user, but excludes unnecessary data details like its "type" (class). Numbers and Dates and a few others do this by default, but I like this style to be available for all types as an "alternate" #abbreviatedPrintString, depending on the use-case I'm printing it for (e.g., as elements of a Collection).
Anyway, I call it #printAbbreviatedOn: in my own code, and even though it's been useful to me over two decades and I still use it, I never actually proposed it for trunk because just the one level of intercept, #printOn:, has proven to be *just the right amount* of abstraction for object printing in a general sense. Simplicity and resilience from original Smalltalk-80 that has withstood the test of time.
Best,
Chris
On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 4:03 PM Thiede, Christoph <
[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi all, please take a look at the following changeset. It eliminates a lot of duplication for printing a string with article, for example:
| title |
title := self class name.
aStream
nextPutAll: (title first isVowel ifTrue: ['an '] ifFalse: ['a ']);
nextPutAll: title.
With this changeset, the example is rewritten much simpler as:
aStream nextPutAll: self class name asString withArticle.
(Additionally, this unification provides a possible hook, should we ever want to increase multilingual support. :))
I tried to find as many occurrences as possible (6), but even if we don't replace them all, I would like to propose to put the following three methods into Trunk (which are part of the changeset, of course):
String >> article
String >> withArticle
^ self article , ' ' , self capitalized
^ self article , self capitalized
Theoretically, we could also put them into the '*System-Support' category. Not sure about this.
Looking forward to your opinions :-)
Best,
Christoph
Locked
articles.1.cs (6K)