>
> Am 2011-04-20 um 22:18 schrieb Ted F.A. van Gaalen:
>
>> Thanks Tobias and Igor for your thoughts about this increment/decrement theme.
>> @Tobias: what kind of side effect(s) are you talking about? I don't
>> understand, sorry.
>
> No problem, I wrote a bit complicated.
> What I mean is that
>        i++
> instructs the object ‘i’ to change its state, ie, increment
> itself.
> However, the Object in ‘i’ is meant to be an
> integer. So, how to interpret that? say, ‘i’ is 5.
> Essentially,
>        i++
> says
>        ‘five, change your state to be six’
> But that would imply, because all integers are the respecive same
> over the image, that all fives are suddenly sixes.
>
> The point is,
> in C, variables denote memory cells, and it is a common
> operation to say ‘memory cell, increment your content by one’,
> whereas in Smalltalk, a variable denotes an object and
> such an increment is rather senseless on integer objects.
>
> In other words, each integer in a Smalltalk image is
> a kind of Singleton.
> (       as
>        1 = 1 " => true"
>        1 == 1 " => true"
> )
> Hence,
> | a b |
> a := 1.
> b := 1.
> a = b " => true (a and b have the same content)".
> a == b "=> true (ie, they are the indentical object)".
>
> "but"
>
> a ++. "hypothetical"
> a = b "=> ??, probably false".
> a == b " => ??, can't think of that".
>