SML@b - The Software Measurement Laboratory of the University of Magdeburg (GERMANY)

Carl Ponder, Bill Bush

Ponder

Reference: Ponder, C.; Bush, B.: Polymorphism Considered Harmful, SIGPLAN Notices, 27(1992)6, pp.~76-79.

"The first table shows, for each (Smalltalk-80 version 2.3, d.R.) procedure name in the system, the number of times it is defined.

no. proc	no. def	no. proc	no. def	no. proc	no. def
2419	1	6	10	1	21
375	2	2	11	1	22
156	3	5	12	1	23
53	4	2	13	1	27
28	5	4	14	1	28
16	6	2	15	1	42
16	7	2	16	1	45
14	8	2	17	1	90
10	9

The problem is not as acute as it might first appear, because many popular procedures, such as initialize, new, size, and at: and at:put: (used for accessing indexed data structures), have general, intuitive, well understood meanings. It is not necessary to know their implementations to have a sense of what they do. On the other hand, other popular procedures, such as displayOn:at:clippingBox:rule:mask:, are complex and obscure. Inferring the generic meaning of such an operation from a few instances of use is difficult. Worse, if one name is shared by different generic operations, the reader is encouraged to infer similarities that do not necessarily exist."