Squeak-dev October 2001

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191 participants
600 discussions

Re: Caveats
by Bob Arning 02 Oct '01

02 Oct '01

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001 22:32:56 -0500 Daniel Joyce <daniel.a.joyce(a)att.net> wrote: > It is not desirable if you use larger fonts. Too many windows assume 12 pt >as the normal size, and are hardcoded for that. > > With a 22 pt font ( needed for 1280x1024, so I can read stuff ), the text >runs outside a lot of buttons, and it looks very unprofessional and hackish. > > I can resize fonts in Gnome, KDE, and Windows, and the buttons resive with >them. >From the jpg you sent, the buttons *did* resize to contain the text. The problem was that the parent of buttons did not resize to enclose the buttons. The issues you point to are easily fixed. In SoundDemoMorph>>initialize, e.g., change self hResizing: #spaceFill. to self hResizing: #shrinkWrap. and you will get something more pleasing. > Squeak has too many hardcoded extents, and morphs that aren't smart enough >to resize properly. Why not submit changes where you think they are needed? > If Squeak is ever going to be taken seriously as a environment by outsiders, >it needs to look professional. That may depend on your intended audience. Some people are wowed by "professional" while others may prefer "fun", "powerful" or "innovative". > Not clipping submorphs is silly. Have you ever seen text appear outside the >window/widget/button that contains it on Win95/KDE/Gnome? I haven't. Never having used any of those, I can't comment. I wonder if you mean resizing rather than clipping in these cases. Having buttons hanging over the edge of their parent seems a bit better than having tham clipped out of existence, but having the parent resize to contain them seems best. > Heck, Microsoft got this right in Windows 3.1. > > Why can't we? I think we can. Cheers, Bob

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Re: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested
by Richard A. O'Keefe 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

"Gary McGovern" <garywork(a)lineone.net> wrote: I've seen how some of these Russians are taught. They get a heavy education in literacy and grammar. In England, that's not true. Grammar has been abolished from the curriculum (Except for the expensive private schools run for the rich). I know people who leave school not even knowing what a verb is. Sorry but that isn't by accident. It's not just England. 10-8 years ago I ran a computational linguistics paper in Melbourne, Australia, and I was getting students who didn't know what a verb was. I was also getting European-ancestry Australian-born-and= educated students at the undergraduate level who wrote "Chinglish", that is, the kind of English written by Asian students who are not used to inflections and have trouble even _hearing_ the difference between "sing" and "sings". (Like I have real trouble distinguishing tones.) It's not accidental; it's just that "evidence-based teaching" is an idea whose time has yet to come. There used to be a saying in New Zealand that we were always five years behind the USA in educational "fashions": wait five years until the latest fashion has PROVEN itself a dumb idea and THEN adopt it. It isn't by accident, but it's not a conspiracy. It's basically the "prescriptivist" (now a dirty word) -vs- "descriptivist" question; current ideology has it that descriptivism is the humane true-to-linguistics approach but prescriptivism is authoritarian (and we all know how evil THAT is (:-)). The problem is that the educators have forgotten (or never cared to learn) that the natural state of natural languages is for people to be unable to talk to the people in the next village but one down the river. This is relevant to Smalltalk: the natural state of programming languages is for Foo Basic to be different from Bar Basic (like the Prolog company that had a Mac Prolog and a DOS Prolog, one of which took angles in degrees and the other of which took angles in radians). I find the recent work on porting things between different Smalltalks encouraging. Well, I was thinking more along the lines of Roboteacher :o) where anyone can download the program over the web and get a good solid education in literacy and grammar just as the well educated people get. Is this something that exists? Where can I read more about it?

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Some questions about become:
by ducasse stephane 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Hi I would like to know if there are some particular points I should pay attention when using become: on some smallIntegers or heavily optimized objects like 1, 2 .... I'm writing a column on useful reflection practices. I like scaffolding patterns http://www.rolemodelsoft.com/patterns/scaffold.htm and I wanted to do a spy on objects (capsules, minimalobject...). And I was wondering if become: is applicable on any object. Thanks Stef

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Re: Celeste improvements!
by Fleeberz＠aol.com 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

In a message dated 2001-10-01 11:19:46 AM, lex(a)cc.gatech.edu writes: >It would be nice to have a filter that chooses a particular thread. I >think this would help with your goal. Unfortunately, thread information >can't be stored in the current index file format, at least not easily. Well, some sort of hack perhaps? celesteThreadBloat.cs? >I guess one of the existing lines of the file could be extended with >more info, as a hack.... Exactly! Or perhaps the file could be left just the way it is, and a parallel file added, maybe using SkipLists... >Also, a general "OR" filter would be nice -- right now all you get is an >implicit "AND" of all active filters. Really, an etoys-like interface >to the filter list would be very nice.... Sure. >Note, if you are willing to hand-mark messages, you can file messages >into a "non-chitchat" category as you read them. (If you aren't-willing >to hand-mark them, I don't see how you are going to distinguish such a >property.) Yes! I was thinking only of hand-marking messages, as I doubt it would be easy to tell chitchat and spam from useful messages (unless of course you filter anything from Fleeberz into /dev/null ;-) --Flee

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Re: Celeste improvements!
by Fleeberz＠aol.com 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

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re: getting accents into Squeak /final concluding postscript?/
by John Hinsley 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Thanks all: seems to me that there are two ways to do it, or, rather, that for those of us with US/UK keyboards, we may need to use two methods simulataneously, at least on *nixes. The global solution (on *nixes) is to use Jamie Zawinski's xkeycaps which is a graphical front end (and more) for xmodmap. It's actually much easier to use than the man page suggests: you simply find a keyboard which matches your own and can then allocate different values to keys you don't use graphically: for example, my [Home] now gives è while Shift + [Home] gives È. And since Xwindow is the big boss responsible for the keyboard, graphics and all that, it'll work on any/every program, Squeak included. This might be all you need: for example, I have a lot of keys I never use (the whole numeric pad, and a few more) and just need Italian and Spanish accented vowels, plus the odd French and Spanish accented constanant and maybe a few German/Hungarian/Brazilian vowels too. That gives me 20+ keys to play about with. The trick is to avoid re-mapping keys you, or the O.S. might want to use in their original form! But if you didn't have enough spare keys, chances are that you'll need to use xkeycaps to allocate a few accents to keys and then use Torge's changeset to combine them with vowels. Thanks again, everyone: now there are no excuses for spelling mañana to rhyme with banana! Cheers John -- Can't cope anymore? Desperate for help? Join the 12 step program for those who yearn to give up Microsoft: http://home.earthlink.net/~penguinrox/index.html

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Re: Localization in code
by Richard A. O'Keefe 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Karl Ramberg <karl.ramberg(a)chello.se> wrote: I find icons and pictures a interesting way to deal with this. Numbers are language independent. So is music notation. Numbers may be language-independent, but digits are not. In Unicode 3.1.1 there are no fewer than 27 versions of "DIGIT ZERO"; No fewer than 5 of them are "fonted" variants for mathematics (I guess the Unicode maintainers have decided that "the thing about rules is, when you break them, break them hard"). But there are 17 genuine culturally different versions of "DIGIT ZERO", seventeen. Then of course there are decimal points and commas: US ',' '.' IEE ' ' '<middot>' EUR '.' ',' and quite a few other variations. The underlying structure is nearly language-independent, but the details of the writing system aren't. As for music notation, it may be language-independent, but it is not culture-independent. Byzantine music notation, old Western music notation, classical Chinese music notation, and modern "Western" music notation are all quite different. (Do I need to mention that modern music notation includes many words, which are sometimes translated, and sometimes not?) Come to think of it, when you see chord names, sometimes you see "Fmin" and sometimes you see "Fmoll". Language difference. As for icons, they are just a hieroglyphic code. By now we have enough icons to make learning Egyptian (which at its peak had about 700 different signs) look easy, and some of the commonest ones don't look the same under different operating systems. Heck, they don't even look the same under different *programs*. I'd be lost without tooltips. Think about this: I have two keyboards on this desk. On one the "power" key is left-hollow-triangle. On the other, it's "bicycle padlock" (or a "C" lying on its back with an "I" between its jaws). Pictures are interesting, but inherently ambiguous.

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Re: Why we should remove {} from Squeak
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Hi Stef. I present ;-) - {} - The argument from simplicity. I expect things in Squeak to dynamicly calculated, unless explicitly cached or immutable. #() is in violation of that. That's forgivable only because it's usually not changed, and filled with immutables - and we do need those often. A syntax is by definition a bunch of patterns that specially handled, I measure a good syntax by getting good expressiveness with few surprises. Theoretically, I'd prefer to see a Smalltalk with no #(), than a Smalltalk with no {}, because {} gives more bang for the buck. Only reason I see to keep #() (and I may be forgetting something here) is speed. Fact is, we also very often need less restricted bunches of stuff to start a calculation out, and you should have a reasonable syntax to do it. So, Stef, a challenge - Provide some alternative, that doesn't make this code look stuffy. Because it's sure doesn't belong in a suit... ;-) Bag new addAll: ((1 to: 5) collect: [:e | Ball colored: {Color white. Color blue. Color red} atRandom]) Daniel P.S. - come to think about it, what if we do dump #(), use {}, and just cache where we need the speed? How bad would that be? "David N. Smith (IBM)" <dnsmith(a)watson.ibm.com> wrote: > Stef: > > But...... > I use it all the time. It's a neat idea. Here is code I found by searching all source for #{. > > EToyIncommingMessages class>>allTypes > > ^MessageTypes ifNil: [ > MessageTypes _ { > self typeKeyboardChat. > self typeMorph. > self typeFridge. > self typeStatusRequest. > self typeStatusReply. > self typeSeeDesktop. > self typeAudioChat. > self typeAudioChatContinuous. > self typeMultiChat. } ] > > HeadMorph>>addSpikyHair > | hair | > hair _ PolygonMorph > vertices: {83@3. 81@30. 91@27. 111@23. 97@32. 112@37. 99@45. 114@52. 95@53. 55@43. 10@50. 1@40. 14@40. 8@26. 24@37. 15@11. 29@29. 30@16. 36@30. 41@6. 49@31. 54@8. 61@32. 64@1. 70@27} > > > Next is a fragment of a demo. The names Babble, Donut and Marble are humorous, but descriptive. > > d := BabbleDonutMorph new largeDonut; name: '- Commons Area -'. > d addAllMarbles: { > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'Wendy'). > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'Dave and Archie at home'). > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'Tom in Minneapolis'). > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'Mark'). > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'Big Screen'). > (BabbleMarbleMorph new mediumMarble name: 'John in the Lab') } shuffled. > > > These are just a few examples I picked to show 'interesting' uses of { and }. I found 794 methods in my image that contained at least one ${. A few were commented out C code. Most were from the array constructor. It's used widely and the result of using it makes the code much more readable than 'Array with:'. > > The construct is useful and widely used. If it has definitional and theoretical problems, then certainly look at how to fix those; but let's not discard a useful construct. > > > At 8:49 +0200 9/30/01, ducasse stephane wrote: > >Hi daniel > > > >I send it into the mailing list too becuase this is important > > > >From a language design perspective > > > >#() is necessary because it is compiled statically and cannot not be > >simulated by other construct. Storing #() in Stack frame is not really goo > >but this is an implementation aspect. > > I don't think this is true at all. #() holds symbols, strings, characters numbers, and in some Smalltalk systems it holds true and false. There is nothing in a #() that you can't write as a literal elsewhere, so: > > #( abc 'abc' 4 3.4 $r ) > > can be written as: > > (Array with: #abc with: 'abc'), (Array with: 4 with: 3.4 with: $r) > > #() is a great convenience, but it is not absolutely necessary. > > >#{} is not necessary because this is shortcut macro-expansion for Array new > >add: .... > > > >So why having only this one. There is two ways: > > or you have a way to describe macro-expansion like in Scheme where you > > can define any macro in a clear way (you know the semantic of the stuff > > > > or we remove it because why not having > > {{}} for Set new add: > > This already has a definition: an empty array in an array, like: #(#()). > > > {#[]} for OrderedCollection new....Because I use more > > OrderedCollection than array > > #[] isn't used in Squeak, but some Smalltalk systems (and maybe the standard) use it as a way of writing ByteArray literals: #[ 0 255 76 98 4 67 2 ]. We should carefully decide if we want to differ from others in syntax. (Actually, 'we' already have; for some odd reason '#[' is a symbol! I would have expected to have to write #'[' to get a symbol with a special character.) > > I use more OrderedCollection's too, but it was interesting to note that after looking at a couple of hundred uses of {} I don't recall seeing even one message send to convert the array to something else. I think that OCs are widely used when code is building an indexed collection, but rare when the collection is built ahead of time by a literal array or array constructor. > > >... SNIP ... > > > > Dave > -- > _______________________________ > David N. Smith > IBM T J Watson Research Center > Hawthorne, NY > dnsmith(a)watson.ibm.com

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Theoretical texts
by Maarten Maartensz 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

L.S. I am new to Squeak (since July) and should like to recieve references to texts that address foundational issues of - Smalltalk - Self - Blockclosures (and Lambda-calculus) on a fairly sophisticated level, especially if these texts were written with reference to and knowledge of mathematical logic. I have read the Blue Book and other introductions, but these do not answer most of the questions I'd like to see discussed, such as e.g. the relation between lambda-calculus and blockclosures. Probably, the sort of stuff I am most interested in would be on line Ph.D.-theses that concern aspects of smalltalk and have been written by mathematical people. Incidentally, on my site I have been uploading over the last months some of my impressions of Squeak (section Computing). Regards, Maarten Maartensz. Website in Holland about philosophy, logic, M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) and much more: http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/

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Re: Augh...
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Wise words. And now that you have the Refactoring Browser available in Squeak, you too, Daniel, have no excuse for not grabbing your little piece of the image and making it better. </shameless plug> Daniel John Hinsley <jhinsley(a)telinco.co.uk> wrote: > Daniel Joyce wrote: > > > > > Squeak seems to suffer from too much enthusiasm, and too little design > > sometimes... ;) > > > > Maybe. But wouldn't it be dreadful if it was the other way round? > -- > Can't cope anymore? Desperate for help? > Join the 12 step program for those who yearn to give up Microsoft: > http://home.earthlink.net/~penguinrox/index.html

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