[Newbies] Scamper and Squeak-4.3

[David Corking]

Chris Cunnington's advice was perfect.

Guillaume wrote:
> Does that mean that Scamper is not available in Squeak 4.3?
> Perhaps he was replaced by another browser?

It is not yet ported to 4.x, nor was it replaced, as far as I know, so
your question prompted me to search the web for other code that might
also interest you (note the dates carefully before you try to load
them):
(1) http://www.squeaksource.com/MediaView.html
(2) External Web Browser
http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/package/a2cf0479-a33d-456f-b3ed-8f312c6c439d

One piece of Smalltalk trivia: here 'browser' remains a generic word
(for system browser, hierarchy browser, and so on) so 'web browser' is
a better term.

>  In any case thank you Chris for your help and I will use Squeak 3.8.1 to
> play with exemples given in the book. I imagine that it's quite easy to
> switch to version 4.3 if you learned with version 3.8.1.

Yes your skills are transferable. Remember to use caret '^' for return
and colon-equality ':=' for assignment, (not the arrow characters from
Smalltalk-80) and not much else can go wrong.

It is also easy to learn from the past, as Squeak's bytecode language
remains compatible across the decades. If you ever choose to load an
old image from http://ftp.squeak.org then it will probably run just
fine. I loaded Squeak 3.0 a moment ago and it works. I was a little
surprised how tiny the text looks on a modern monitor, but there are a
few larger fonts built in and a menu to select them: and lots of the
code has those wonderful but obsolete up arrows and left arrows. Also
Scamper works in 3.0, but for popular websites including the Squeak
wiki and Google - it shows the source instead of rendering the page.

There are all kinds of delights for the novice in older code. One of
my favourites is the animated singing heads, but I will leave it as an
exercise for you to find them.

Hope that helps, David