Dwight,

Thanks for that interesting and detailed reply. I can see now why you want
to do this in Squeak. Regarding the 'glue' issue, however, it does have two
sides. On the one hand, you get a free ride on whatever functionality you
can glue in. On the other, you are stuck with the shortcomings, bugs,
platform specificity etc of the thing you are glueing to. I know there have
been posts to the group mentioning the myriad difficulties of things like
native widgets etc. However, look at how quickly we got the full
functionality of Perl's Regular Expressions in Squeak, thanks to some clever
glueing by Andrew. Similarly, I once linked from Dolphin Smalltalk to
Cards32.dll to get a card game up and running very quickly, and SUGAR
implemented a full link to the winAPI. This is orders of magnitude faster
and more effective than re-writing REs or card-drawing routines, etc in
Smalltalk. Your point about evolutionary leverage is well taken. I will be
severely constrained if I want to draw my cards in bright pink, or change
the parsing of RE. Nevertheless, by wrapping these things as Squeak objects,
I can do some limited behaviour extensions.

>From a practical point of view, glueing is often far more time-effective
than writing from scratch, particularly since software is so ephemeral (I
guess no-one believes this when they are actually writing their stunning new
program). If and when Squeak is used for commercial projects, this is likely
to become a bigger issue.

>Building tools like these within Squeak follows the tenet that
>single-language systems allow far greater evolutionary leverage and
>potential than mixed-language systems. (A principle expounded by Alan
>Kay, but I cannot remember the exact quote at the moment.) Thus the
>tools evolve with the system and the system's evolution is facilitated
>by the tools. From this I think you can see that glueing bits from
>multiple languages together is not generally of primary interest to me
>-- my reason is simply that the limits of what you can create are
>embodied in the limits of each part. Legos are great, and you can create
>many kinds of structures and forms, but in the end you cannot exceed the
>limiting properties of a individual Lego piece -- and you cannot change
>those properties. You cannot build a working tokamak reactor with Legos.
>;-)


I guess this comes down to the granularity of the reuse component....

Peter