Getting Started with Squeak

Dan Ingalls DanI at wdi.disney.com
Thu Oct 1 00:15:33 UTC 1998


>The self-reflective and late-binding nature of
>Smalltalk allows you to create views that are more de-coupled from their
>models.  For example, when a textbox sends #getText to its model, it
>doesn't care what the model is, as long as it can respond to getText -- you
>can even swap the model at run-time, and as long as the message is
>answerable, it all works.  Olsen contrasts this with C/C++ where the
>compiler requires the model and view to be linked together at compile time,
>the types have to match, etc.

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.

	- D





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