Bijan Parsia <bparsia at email.unc.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Lex Spoon wrote:
> [snip]
> > And I'll propose a modification of your scheme: store Squeak "scripts"
> > as small image segments.  Have the minimal 2M image used for simply
> > executing scripts, and have a 6M image around that's used for editting
> > them.
> 
> Ok, clearly the minimal 2M image is going to include a compiler, etc. So
> why not do the Python thing and let users compose their sciprts as text
> files and compile them on first run to .stc (analogous to .pyc) files
> (aka, image segments)?
> 
> Make everyone happy!
> 

I'm going to echo Apple and Microsoft and say, nobody really wants this,
they just think they do.  Why edit Smalltalk in emacs or vi, when
Smalltalk has very nice browsers already?

Smalltalk has senders-of, help with class definitions, and easy storage
of static data.  Files have grep, long-form class definitions, and a
myriad of choices for initializing static data.  Why go back
to text files to hold Smalltalk stuff?

I'll grant, this mythical 2M image doesn't exist right now, and neither
does the necessary support in the regular image.  But it seems like a
better way to go.  Snapshot loading is much faster than its made to out
to be!  In fact, it seems fast enough already to be tolerable as is.


-Lex