Just when it was all going so well....  I started trying to port Pier to use Magritte with pragmas and hit some issues:

Pier structures are instantiated with snippets of code thus:

addChild: ((PRComponent named: 'children')
componentClass: PRChildrenWidget;
write: 1 using: PRChildrenWidget descriptionLevel;
yourself);


the description is no longer defined on the class side so the above doesn't work. Superficially a quick solution might be modify the code thus:

addChild: ((PRComponent named: 'children')
componentClass: PRChildrenWidget;
write: 1 using: (PRChildrenWidget new) descriptionLevel;
yourself);


However within PRComponent the method PRComponent>>#componentDescription currently uses the componentClass to generate the descriptions. Again this could be modified to create an instance and retrieve the descriptions from the instance. However I started to wonder if there is a better way, rather than creating numerous temporary instances for extracting the descriptions. My initial idea is to pass a prototypical instance instance to PRComponent with the default values set, this would then eliminate the need to create multiple instances for description retrieval - the descriptions can be retrieved directly from the prototypical instance. The above code would then be something like:

addChild: ((PRComponent named: 'children')
prototypeInstance: ((PRChildrenWidget new) descriptionLevel: 1; yourself);
yourself);


Then I run into more issues as PRChildrenWidget doesn't currently have write accessors for described properties (nor do any objects derived from PRWidget), clearly that could be fixed ... but I'm starting to wonder if I'm going down a sensible path and the modifications required simply fall out of having instance-side descriptions or if I'm heading completely in the wrong direction.

Thoughts?

Nick