All -

Please forgive a newbie for stepping in, but I've been (quietly) looking at
Squeak for awhile and have examined this issue a little for the purpose of
creating small, configurable VMs.

Andreas Raab writes:

>I'm not sure what you understand by plugin naming conventions... [snip]

I think a naming convention must address the following concerns :

1) At the moment, it seems all named primitive method names must be unique
across all classes, with the possibility of collisions higher than the
normal case with Smalltalk.  I'm not sure if there is a collision between
names across modules.  This is a side effect of the C translation - there's
really no reason why the class name can't be prepended to the method name.

2) There should be a way to handle the named primitive call where some VMs
have them external, and others internal, with the Smalltalk code glue
indifferent.  As I understand the Mac code, the search is done in either
one or the other depending upon the call.  It seems like a minor fix to
have the function searched in the supplied module name, then in the VM on
failure. This would also allow the overriding of malfunctioning or
"in-the-process-of-enhancement" primitives. Currently, moving the Balloon
classes to an external module requires modification all of the primitive
calls.

3) Mac people in particular might be turned off to the Squeak directory
containing piles of plug-ins - there should also be a (platform-dependent?)
convention for collecting plug-ins that will be searched for.

Regards -


===================================================
Duane Maxwell         dmaxwell (at) launchpados.com
CTO                      http://www.launchpados.com
Launchpad, Inc.                 (619) 578-8500 x226

Information contained herein is my personal opinion
    and not necessarily that of Launchpad, Inc.
===================================================