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Like anyone else who plays Dwemthy’s Array, Darren Hobbs plays a rabbit who is going to die at the hands of a metaprogrammed Dragon. But this particular rabbit is working to rewrite the Array itself in Smalltalk.

My primary motivation is that, basically, I have a perverse desire to prove that Smalltalk is flexible enough to bend in these directions. Being able to extend the class definition mechanism, where needed, is a potentially very powerful tool. Being able to change the fundamentals of the platform, where needed, is an even more powerful tool. I hope my inexperienced but enthusiastic experiments aren’t misinterpreted as being critical, that is entirely not the case.

I’ve recently updated the Dwemthy’s Array page to reflect the latest version, as taught in W(P)GtR. Thanks to MenTaL and a few other folks on the mailing list, the evaluated strings have been replaced by the more graceful eval blocks and define_method calls. Maybe this will help Darren and other rabbits who want to fight the dragon but, alas, don’t speak the native Dwemthy tongue.

You can see his first stab at conversion from a couple days back.