Getting Started with Squeak

Nick Vargish nav at patriot.net
Thu Oct 1 04:18:32 UTC 1998


Dan, 

Thanks for giving an incredibly apt example of what I meant when I said
that Smalltalk may be the only language really well suited to UI
development. It's a combination (dare I say, "synergy" --
whoops, guess I do) between the design of the language, and the
environment that it usually "lives" in.

Well, thanks for many other things too, while I'm at it. :^)

Nick

On Wed, 30 Sep 1998, Dan Ingalls wrote:

> I have to relate an anecdote from the early days.  We were using
> Smalltalk-76, the first Smalltalk that performed well enough to support
> serious software (it had the same engine as Smalltalk-80, and a simpler
> body ;-).     
> There was a student (I can't remember who this was) on one of the Alto's
> in the corridor who was having fun implementing a Fraction class (there
> wasn't one built in).  He came over and asked me to give him some help
> because he had gotten things in such a shape that something was
> preventing the screen from redisplaying successfully when he proceeded
> from the debugger.      
> I went over and started to paw around, and discovered fairly soon that
> the bottom-level call on BitBlt was recieving Fractions as parameters,
> and was therefore failing.  As I looked around to see how that happened,
> I was  astounded to find that the entire browser in question had fractions in
> practically every point and rectangle in all its views and subviews.  I
> asked him about this, and he said, "I just reframed it, but maybe it was
> because I made divide return a fraction."  I said, "Hmm, maybe so.  What
> do you send to a Fraction to get the integer part?"  He told me.  I
> added the coercion to BitBlt's fail code, and the whole thing proceeded to run
> just fine when I restarted the method.  I remember feeling almost dizzy
> on the way back to my office.  

--
Nick Vargish                  patriot.net/~nav                 nav at patriot.net
Unix Systems Engineer; C, C++, Java, Perl, Tcl, Lisp, Shell; Internet Security
I believe in private and trustable communication; PGP key available on request
                   Louis Freeh, decrypt this: SHPX LBH!





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