I’ve always been fascinated with the way conditionals are implemented in Smalltalk. Rather than having built-in if/then/else keywords, Smalltalk uses polymorphism. The Boolean subclasses True and False simply implement #ifTrue:, #ifFalse:, #ifTrue:ifFalse:, #and:, #or:, etc. appropriately for themselves. This is a brilliant design, and understanding it got me closer to really understanding Smalltalk.

Using these methods, you write conditional code like so:

Conditional Code in Smalltalk
process isRunning ifTrue: [process stop]

In contrast, Ruby does use if and else keywords, as well as unless. Interestingly, it also provides suffix versions of these keywords, so you can write:

Suffix Conditionals in Ruby
process.stop if process.running?

This makes for a relatively terse one-liner that sometimes reads better than the way we traditionally write conditionals.

I find that I sometimes want the focus of a conditional statement to be on the action, rather than the condition. In that case I prefer the suffix form, but Smalltalk doesn’t have that form built in. It’s simple enough to add, though, so I did.

SuffixConditionals provides #if: and #unless: methods on BlockClosure that allow writing suffix-style conditional statements in Visualworks Smalltalk:

Suffix If in Smalltalk
[process stop] if: process isRunning

or:

Suffix Unless in Smalltalk
[process start] unless: process isRunning

I don’t use these forms everywhere, because they don’t always read better than the standard #ifTrue:/#ifFalse: variants. Also, the standard variants are optimized in the VM so using the suffix variants will introduce a slight performance penalty. I tend to prefer expressive code until my profiler tells me I have a problem, so I’m not worried about that too much.

SuffixConditionals’ primary home is the Cincom Public Store Repository. Check there for the latest version. I’ve put a snapshot of the current version of SuffixConditionals on GitHub. I’ve also submitted it for inclusion as a contributed package in a forthcoming Visualworks release.

SuffixConditionals was developed in VW 7.9.1, but is intended to be compatible with any version of Visualworks Smalltalk. The code could also easily be ported to any other Smalltalk.

SuffixConditionals is released under the MIT license.