[Grace-core] Fwd: Some notes on pattern matching on the wiki

[Ewan Tempero]

(I've only had half an eye on the discussion so apologies if I've missed 
the point somewhere.)

I went through a phase in my early days of Java programming when I used 
"this" for all self calls (and access to fields) only to find it totally 
was wrong in the context of nested classes.

So what is the graceful view of nested classes anyway?

But I do like the idea of an explicit self. I speculate that it would 
make places where the self call results in code in a descendent class to 
be invoked (aka template methods). If the responses I got to a question 
on this in the exam I marked last week is anything to go by, students 
need some sort of help getting their heads around this. An explicit 
receiver might help (and you know I don't like implicit things).

--ewan

On 05/07/11 19:11, James Noble wrote:
>>>> Two things =>  two syntaxes.   Makes for easy teaching and learning.
>>>
>>> Or makes for the argument that we are unnecessarily separating things that are the same.
>>
>> If they were the same ... but they are not.
>
> that's the trick: it depends on the conceptual model.
> Newspeak&  Self say "everything is a message send" and have a self-consistent
> (albeit occasionally tortured)  conceptual model to justify that.
>
> I'm not quite sure why, but minigrace/js (which I've been banging on the last couple of days)
> requires an explicit self.  And the code doesn't look *too* horrible!
>
> James