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From: brian@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Brian Antao)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Access methods - New feature ?
Summary: automatic addition of access methods, desirable new feature ?
Keywords: Access methods, Smalltalk-80
Message-ID: <1991Apr21.221149.8057@vuse.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 91 22:11:49 GMT
Sender: brian@vuse.vanderbilt.edu
Organization: Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, Nashville, TN, USA
Lines: 29
Nntp-Posting-Host: ee6

Hi,
	Having been a moderately heavy user of Smalltalk-80 (ParcPlace sys,
Objectworks), I had a suggestion that may be fairly easy to implement and
would save some programming effort. Often one needs to define access methods
with each Class definition, these methods simply return the current value of
an instance variable. The suggested feature would be, that the compiler/
interpreter, by default inserts these methods corresponding to each instance
variable specified in the Class definition. Each time the Class definition is
recompiled, the appropriate access methods should be added/deleted if any
instance variables are added/deleted. One could also argue for a similar
feature to also support class variable access. 
I vaguely remember that some of the earlier Smalltalk-80 versions, 1.xx or
2.2 that did something on the lines of the above functionality.
Do other smalltalk-80 users feel positively about this ?
	 

ParcPlace Objectworks developers:  would you take up on this ?? or is this
feature available as an addOn like the BOSS, with the ObjectKit ?



 


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Brian Antao,                               |FAX: 615-343-6449
Vanderbilt University,                     |INET: brian@vuse.vanderbilt.edu
Department of Electrical Engg.,            |UUCP: ...!uunet!vuse!brian