What Are Pragmas and How Can They Make You More Productive?
A “pragma” allows you to annotate a method with declarative metadata.
In this year-end edition of the Digest, we’ve given several examples of how Cincom Smalltalk helps customers, partners and users with productivity in their software development. Another way to be productive with Cincom Smalltalk is through pragmas.
The idea for this screencast came when a Cincom Smalltalk engineer suggested a Hidden Gems on “pragmas,” which was the seed idea. That idea was enhanced with the thought regarding productivity and wanting to show a practical use of pragmas, combined with wanting a faster way to launch browser subsets that are frequently used in development. A “pragma” allows you to annotate a method with declarative metadata.
In this Hidden Gems screencast, we:
- Shared what pragmas are
- Built some productivity tools and made them available in the launcher using pragmas
- Gave some other tool tips (GHPragmaSender, a tool in Contributed Components on our website):
- GHPragmaSender can be found in the Contributed/Heeg directory as well as the public repository.
- GHPragmaSender allows you to search for senders and implementers of pragmas, just as you do with methods.
Watch this Hidden Gem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr4nC8HTYI0
This screencast is part of the Hidden Gems Tools Series, which looks at some tools and product features that developers might find useful. Furthermore, this screencast is part of the Techniques Series, which demonstrates various techniques for accomplishing or solving various tasks ranging from automating image build to creating a custom parser.
Please send comments, questions and suggestions to the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.