>I too am very curious...can anyone describe what an "object browser" might
>look like?  Did Self have such a thing (it must have).  Also, when you add
>methods, what happens to the source?

Yes, Self has some object browser-thing (called outliner btw).  There're an
OOPSLA'95 document available online (called The Self-4.0 User Interface:
....) which describes that and other tools.  At the moment I don't remember
any direct pointers, but if you browse to www.cetus-links.org and search
the Self section, you should find it.  There's also a nice Self tutorial
online somewhere from which you can probably get a good impression of Self
(also linked from cetus).

Actually, the outlines resembles all that property editors, object
explorers, etc of most modern IDEs, for example VisualBasic or Delphi -
with the exception, that it not only contains a tabular view of slots and
values but also shows method signatures and method bodies.  Two nice
features are (IMHO) that the tool supports drag and drop for most actions
and that it will always move, grow and shrink as needed (I never saw that
but I got the impression that this gives you a "very concrete" feeling
about your objects).  Like in a Macintosh tree view, you can expand and
collapse slot categories and open little evaluator objects and method
bodies as needed.

Regarding the way how to track changes to the source code and how to
simulate something like Smalltalk change files and projects, I've no idea
but I believe this is a really important feature we need to make real use
of a class-less subsystem inside of Squeak.

bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  ...and now something completely different