Smalltalk and C-style language difference
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2004-01-30

A lot of people take one look at the Smalltalk syntax and turn away for good. This is not understandable given that most languages change the C-style syntax slightly any way.. regex is completely different.. stack based languages are completely different again.. functional languages are different. Open your minds people.

I have one particular example that I'd like to share with you though. Here it is:

canvas displayLineFrom: (topPoint x - gibDistance @ topPoint y) to: (topPoint + 1).

This in C-style is:

canvas.displayLineFrom_to( Point.asPoint(topPoint.x() - gibDistance, topPoint.y()), topPoint.MoveBy(1,1));

I'd just like to say that both are nasty to read.. but, these days I find the Smalltalk syntax much more concise when it comes to these sorts of co-ordinate type calculations.