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Dawson wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4F96EFE6.7010401@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi Louis,
thanks for your very helpful posts, particularly the most recent one ...
On 24/04/12 6:49 PM, Louis LaBrunda wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi Dawson and Dawson's 15 year old son,
>From your code below, I assume that somewhere in your program you have
created (instantiated) nine cells in instance variables named cell1-cell9.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Yes, you are right .. these are instantiations of a class (more info in
my other reply to Randal)
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">This is fine but you should realize that they (cell1-cell9) are variables
that hold pointers to the objects and not really the objects themselves. It
is okay to think of them as the objects because for the most part it is
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Yes, I was using inexact language here (back to everything is an object
... are pointers in Squeak considered objects then? or is this a case of
something that isn't an object in Squeak?)
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">easier than thinking of them as pointers to objects. The real point is to
realize that more than one variable can point to the same instance of an
object. For example, if I were to write:
cell10 := cell1.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Point taken.
SNIP
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Back to your program. I assume that you have a good reason for putting the
cells in variables named (cell1-cell9) and again that is fine but there is
no reason why you can't have the same objects addressable or accessible
from a collection.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Yeah .. I suppose with very little context it looks like we haven't got
a clue what we are doing. (Maybe we don't, but what we've written so far
works even if there is a bit of brute force kind of stuff in there). To
be honest, it is why we started asking questions, as a trained engineer,
and as an artist, I like elegant solutions, perhaps that is what drew me
to Squeak after my son began enquiring if we could learn it together.
But our program right now is certainly not very elegant yet. As we learn
more we can tweak it though.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Smalltalk's collection classes are one of its many unknown treasures. They
are a big part of why Smalltalk code is shorter and more understandable
than code of other languages. Check them out. And please keep asking
questions.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
Excellent. We have read the "Squeak by Example" book, but we don't
always know how to use the stuff we've read about even after following
the examples. We figured after we wrote this program, that we'd re-read
the book, and get more out of it the next time through.
Thanks again for taking the time to write your advice and suggestions,
we appreciate it.
Dawson
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</pre>
</blockquote>
I found Stephan Wessels' Laser Game [1] very useful as an end-to-end
development example.<br>
Seeing how the development of a whole application progresses using
Squeak is quite insightful.<br>
It is written against an older Squeak 3.9, but I just downloaded that
version to match the tutorial.<br>
<br>
[1] <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/008.html">http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/008.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/">http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/</a><br>
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