Perhaps this could be integrated into the standard browser.  Ship the
"standard" images with this turned on, so beginners could see messages
"enboxed", and put something in an obvious place (like the right-click menu
on a browser code pane) to allow the "boxing" to be turned off.

Bob Jarvis
Compuware @ Timken

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Doug Way [SMTP:dway at mat.net]
> Sent:	Wednesday, February 16, 2000 4:35 PM
> To:	'squeak at cs.uiuc.edu'
> Subject:	Re: warren _ squeakUser new.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Warren Postma wrote:
> 
> > I'll confess my bias right out: I don't like Smalltalk's syntax. [yet.]
> > 
> > I'm a confirmed C/Delphi/Python bigot! :-)
> 
> Thinking back to when I was an absolute beginner in Smalltalk, one problem
> I had was that the order of operations in the Smalltalk syntax was not
> immediately intuitively obvious.  (Of course this is true to some extent
> with any unfamiliar programming language.)
> 
> Even after you get past the absolute beginner stage, and on to the
> intermediate-beginner stage, you might have to think for a few seconds
> about the order of operations when looking at code.  (Although once you
> get past this stage, that's it... you don't need to worry about an
> additional 200 syntax subtleties as with, say, C++.)
> 
> If this is your problem, as an experiment you might want to play with Bob
> Arning's SyntaxMorph utility.  This lets you bring up a special view on a
> method which draws boxes around all of the messages, such that the order
> of operations becomes immediately obvious.  You can also menu-click on
> each word or phrase and see whether it's an instance variable, a message,
> etc.  Using this alongside a regular browser would greatly reduce the
> learning curve for absolute beginners, I'd think.
> 
> It's available at:
> 
> http://www.charm.net/~arning/SyntaxMorph.24Aug623pm.cs
> 
> (It also works in the debugger, which is a lot of fun. :-))
> 
> - Doug Way
>   EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
>   http://www.transom.com
>   dway at mat.net, @eai.com