[Newbies] Object new

[David T. Lewis]

Hi John,

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 07:01:31AM -0500, John McCulloch wrote:
> I was trying to decide whether I wanted to use GNU Smalltalk or Squeak.  My
> version of Ubuntu doesn't have a version of of gst with GUI that works so
> I'm going with Squeak.  This issue applies to both anyway.  It's not a
> problem but more of an issue about understanding how stuff works.

Welcome :-)

> 
> The issue is with creating new classes by including "Object new".   The
> Object class doesn't have a #new method.   ProtoObject doesn't either.  
> Class Behavior has one but that is a subClass of Object.  Is this the #new
> that gets called and if so, how does Squeak know to use it?  If it's
> somewhere else, where is it?
>

Yes, you have it right. It is calling Behavior>>new.

You can explore this interactively as follows:

- Open a new workspace, and type "Object new" in the workspace.

- Highlight "Object new" and do a right-click to bring up a menu of options.

- Select "Debug it" from the menu.

- This will begin evaluation of the "Object new" expression, running in a debugger.

- Click the "Into" button in the debugger to step into the "new" method, which
is an instance-side method in class Behavior.

You are actually exploring a tricky and interesting part of the system
at this point. To get an idea of how it works, try this:

- In your workspace, type "Class".

- Right-click, and "inspect it" from the menu.

- You will get an inspector on "Class class".

- Look at the instance variables for class Class in the inspector,
and have a look at "subclasses".

- You will see that ProtoObject class is a subclass of class Class.

If you look at ProtoObject in a browser, you see it as the root of the
entire hierarchy of classes. But that connection you saw in the inspector
on "Class class" provides hidden magic.

Dave