Comment by igouy

2 days ago 

    'justastring' at: 6 put: $S; yourself

    'justaString' .

However

    #'justasymbol' at: 6 put: $S; yourself

    errorNoModification
        self error:  'symbols can not be modified.'

2 comments

igouy

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anonnon  2 days ago

> 'justastring' at: 6 put: $S; yourself

Evaluating this yields an error in both Squeak and Pharo. What Smalltalk are you using? I'm going to guess Cuis, in which case your example holds, but is misleading. Consider:

    a:='justastring'.
    b:='justastring'.
    a at: 6 put: $S.
    a, ' = ', b.
    'justaString = justaString' .

Notice, modifying "a" also modified "b," because of the shared literal frame entry. This is why you were traditionally admonished to avoid directly modifying string literals. (Which wasn't an issue given the design of the string classes, and the general poor manners of destructively modifying a string argument of unknown origin.)

  • igouy  1 day ago

    Cuis.

        | a b |
    a := 'justastring'.
    b := 'justastring'.
    a == b

    true .