I come to praise .join, not to bury it...

Darren New dnew at san.rr.com
Thu Mar 15 18:15:28 EST 2001


> Hmm ... I wonder what I'd do if I could overload __if__ ...

That's how Smalltalk works. It has no "if" statement. There's an "IfElse"
method that takes two blocks. True evaluates its first argument, False its
second, in a polymorphic way. So

bool if: [yes yes] else: [no no]

doesn't contain any branching code. Just a polymorphic dispatch. Very
strange to wrap your head around. :-)

(Of course, in reality, it branches for efficiency, recognised by the
compiler, but in theory...)

-- 
Darren New / Senior MTS & Free Radical / Invisible Worlds Inc.
San Diego, CA, USA (PST).  Cryptokeys on demand.



More information about the Python-list mailing list