<div dir="ltr">On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 1:30 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Tcykgreis@aol.com">Tcykgreis@aol.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial;"><font size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial">
<div>I have had a curiosity about Smalltalk for many years so I recently
downloaded and installed Squeak. That's when the trouble began. I have written
applications that deal bridge hands and either display the hands on screen or
save them in a couple of different formats. I originally wrote the 'words' in
Forth. I later tried Ruby and rewrote most of the programs in Ruby. I did it as
a learning experience. I sat out to do the same thing in Squeak, again as a
learning experience, but have made virtually no progress. I create the class
'Bridge' with the subclass of dealer. I try to initialize by filling a byteArray
with 52 numbers, 0 through 51. </div></font></div></blockquote><div><br>Woah...what? This doesn't really make any sense.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial;"><font size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial"><div>I tended to create additional methods to shuffle
and deal the cards to four more byte arrays named north, east, south, and west.
Eventually I will need another method to "stack the deck." I will also need a
counter to keep track of the deal number.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I can't get started, and I mean zero progress, because I can't create and
load deck. It seems like the documentation is never quit up to date. I read
about curly braces and tried deck := {0. 1. 2. ... }. When I try to accept it,
first deck is questioned and then after deck I get something about not expecting
anything else.</div></font></div></blockquote><div><br>This is because deck is undeclared, and then because you have a syntax error.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<div>I know there is a word 'asByteArray:' and I assume a number would specify
the size of the array but nowhere can I find anything about the order in which
the information should be provided. I tried deck asByteArray: 52 but I don't
know if it worked. If it did work, how do I load the bytes into it? How do I
look at a byte in a particular location in the array? Can I remove a byte from
position x and/or insert a byte at position y and everything moves to
accommodate the change.</div></font></div></blockquote><div><br>First of all, are you familiar with the syntax? <br><br>Squeak by example will help guide you through looking at classes, and seeing what methods they have etc. <br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial;"><font size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial"><div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>In Forth and Ruby, I was able to store the hands as a 2D bit array, 4 suits
and 13 bits. If the card was present the bit was set. When I dealt the cards,
the appropriate bits were set.. This worked really well. The suits came out
already sorted. The strength of a suit turned out to be related to the value
stored for the suit. The number of cards in the suit could be found by counting
set bits. I have yet to find bit-manipulating words in Squeak/Smalltalk.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As an aside, the least number of bits that must be used to store a complete
deal is 104 or 13 bytes. The bits are arranged in 52 2-bit groups. The position
in the array represents the value of the card and the bits determine which hands
gets the card represented by that position. When you shuffle the 2-bit groups
must be kept in tact. I could easily do this in Forth but could not do it in
Ruby. If you are going to save a few million hands, it is nice to be able to do
so in this most compact form.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>If I could just figure out where to find the answers to these beginner
question, I would really appreciate it. It would also be nice if I could see
some examples of these methods.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Charlie</div>
<div> </div></font></div></blockquote><div><br>I would recommend that you create a card class, with a member variable that represents the suit (probably as a symbol) and a second member variable that represents the card in the suit. Create a class method that returns new instances (eventually have it throw an exception if something out of the range of what is acceptable is created) and have a second class method that creates a collection of cards that contains all the cards, in order. You can use the methods on the appropriate collection to shuffle it.<br>
<br>Once you've built something working on that, you can try to optimise storage, either on disk or in memory. <br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial;"><font size="2" color="#000000" face="Arial"><div></div>
<div> </div></font><br><br><br><div><font style="color: black; font-family: ARIAL,SAN-SERIF; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 10pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;"><hr style="margin-top: 10px;">
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