Senders of non-symbols

Is there a good reason "browse senders" (cmd-n) does not accept integers, only symbols? This works fine:

        SystemNavigation default browseAllCallsOn: 41

It seems it's only the text editor's check for interned symbols preventing this use.

(in case you're wondering: I wanted to know what BitBlt rule 41 was used for)

- Bert -

On 23-06-2014, at 7:53 AM, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Is there a good reason "browse senders" (cmd-n) does not accept integers, only symbols?

I imagine it’s a thing from history; originally looking for senders meant finding actual sends of messages with the specified name. Since messages beyond the special ones were in the method literals it was easy to implement looking for anything in the literals.

I tend to use the ‘method source with it’ a lot for jobs like finding 41; on modern machines it’s so fast it isn’t even a bother. We should probably take out the rather pointless warning about it taking a few minutes! It might be interesting to allow a wildcard (regexp! yay!) search of method sources.

And surely there isn’t any point whatsoever in the ancient preference about ‘thorough senders’. That lost its purpose in life, what, 15 years ago?




tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
taffeta - Welsh goats cheese

I support the idea, although it seems like "References" might be a
better fit semantically.

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote: