An interesting project. And the first that I know of that integrates something like Smalltalk directly into a Unix environment.

I like the syntax.

I also like the interesting direction you went with pattern matching selectors. That is a nice change and quite different from your typical Smalltalk or Objc code.

Thanks!

The pattern matching is for Polymorphic Identifiers[1][2], which in turn support what I call "in-process REST"[3][4].

[1] http://objective.st/URIs/

[2] https://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/hirschfeld/publications/media...

[3] https://www.slideshare.net/MarcelWeiher/in-processrest

[4] https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-9299-3_...

I briefly thought about the beginnings of this after looking at KVC. I pondered the dots vs slashes question, what a query would look like, and whether every object in a process could have a name. Fun to think about, but that is as far as I got. You have taken this much further.

Huh, this is an interesting solution. When I started reading this post and took a look at the syntax, I had expected some sort of sugar that looked like Swift's @dynamicCallable where the "selector" would be passed in as a string and you'd parse it at runtime. This way, you don't have a specify an "endpoint" for every operation, but I guess you lose some compile-time checking?

Thanks!

Scheme handlers (or stores[1]) were initially implemented that way. There is a protocol of methods taking references, and you implement these methods, for example -objectForReference:, with, as you write, runtime parsing of the reference (often, but not necessarily strings).

Having implemented a good number of stores[2] and scheme handlers[3] that way, I can tell you it gets old quick. :-)

Given the emphasis I put on Polymorphic Identifiers in Objective-Smalltalk, it was obvious that I needed better language support for scheme-handlers, generalising the "properties" concept found in many languages now (Objective-C, C#, Swift, Python) with path- and pattern-matching as found in various REST toolkits was one of those in-the-shower epiphanies.

The patterns ( /:table/count ) mean that you don't actually have to have a separate endpoint for each path, you can group semantically related paths as you wish. There is also a wildcard pattern (the asterisk) if you want to just match everything beyond that. So for example:

   /property/* { |= { 3.} }

Returns the number "3" for all paths prefixed by "/property".

   /property/*:path { |= {  path. }  }}

Returns the remainder of the path (or you can use it for your own custom matching).

[1] https://github.com/mpw/MPWFoundation/blob/master/Documentati...

[2] https://github.com/mpw/MPWFoundation/tree/master/Stores.subp...

[3] https://github.com/mpw/Objective-Smalltalk/tree/master/Schem...

Interesting, I will have to try it out myself when I get some free time. While I don't know Smalltalk very well, from the perspective of an Objective-C developer the way you have designed the project's features is quite fascinating.