Your Doing It Wrong (was Re: [Newbies] Instability)

[Casey Ransberger]

Inline. 

On Sep 12, 2011, at 10:00 PM, Overcomer Man <overcomer.man at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Which image, VM, operating system did you use?  
> Cuis, Squeak 4.2  .exe, WinXP Pro

Crap. Can't actually help with VM level stuff, as I don't presently have anything that runs Windows lying around. 

> > Did the method body contain quotes?
> Yes and I got errors as I was trying to manually add quotes to make size work.

My guess is: you loaded an old system from Package Universes, which hasn't been maintained in forever, and the code you loaded from there had assumptions about the structure of the system which aren't valid anymore. 

Unless I'm mixing up one problem you had with another. 

To get the stack trace, you can easily use the halo. Do you know how to bring up the halo? It depends on OS, but on my Mac, I hold option and click. It's probably control or alt, more likely alt, with the Windows VM.

Anyway, if you pull the halo on the debugger, you should be able to click the wrench, which will give you an inspector that you can use to drill down into the actual stack trace. 

Also, there's really no linguistic difference in stability. In general, Smalltalk apps tend to be a little more stable than stuff written at the low level, in the way that high level languages with garbage collection tend. 

But if you're loading code which was written for a much older version, you'll run into a subset of the problems you'll have doing the same thing with an app written in C++. 

Does this make sense?

> > Where did you copy the method from? What was the error you got? 
> > What were the subsequent errors you got from the workspace?
> > Can you copy the stack trace?
>  Please explain how to copy the stack trace.  Then I'll do it over, record and send these details.
>  
> > Your Smalltalk is as stable as a C application, because it is a C application. :)
>  No, the VM is a C application, the image is a Smalltalk application, right?
>  
> Kirk
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