[Glass] [Pharo-dev] printString and asString

[Carlo]

To me #asString is meant to be used when you need an object with the String protocol.
As mentioned it looks like the seaside #asString and #greaseString are meant for displaying which causes the confusion but I’m not sure why #displayString was removed apart from the obvious reasons of trying to cater for common denominator across Smalltalk dialects.

In my codebases I also tend to use #asString for displaying but have tried to move to a #displayString and #displayOn: protocol for these purposes.

Regards
Carlo


On 03 Jan 2014, at 1:24 PM, Otto Behrens <otto at finworks.biz> wrote:

> #printString and #printOn: protocol should be used for printing and #asString for conversion. This implies that #asString should not depend on #print protocol.

Ah, I used it the other way around: printOn depends on asString. I saw
'conversion' as the lower level.

Why do you distinguish here between conversion and 'printing'?
Especially if displayString is being replaced with asString - to me
that sounds against your thinking in principle.

> If we are going to use #asString to mimic #displayString (instead of as a conversion method) then to me #asString should be viewed at a higher level abstraction than #printOn:. If not then we can run into these issues when calling the higher-level abstraction from a lower level in the same objectt, as you mentioned. Calling #printString from #asString from an API perspective should not cause issues (as displaying something is very different from converting something) so I’d say this is an API design problem.

Yes, I think the API could be clearer. So this becomes the essence of
the question here: What is the meaning of these methods from an API
perspective?

Thanks for the response