This is fantastic, Ivan.  Maybe we can put something like this into one
of the welcome windows?  We could mark it "for those who really want to
learn to program with this system" or somesuch.

Incidentally, everything up to the "Creating Applications" section could
be independent of dialect.  Unfortunately one or two of the messages
used is not in Squeak.  For example, Squeak has #reversed instead of
#reverse.

Anyway, good job.  This really ought to help people learn the basic
mechanics of Smalltalk.


-Lex



"Ivan Tomek" <ivan.tomek at acadiau.ca> wrote:
> David,
> 
> I have recently written a short introduction to Smalltalk for beginners 
> answering questions such as yours and more. It's definitely not 
> definitive yet but I am attaching a copy anyway. I hope to improve 
> this preliminary version using suggestions from this and other groups.
> 
> I apologize that the text is written for VisualWorks, but almost all of it 
> applies to any Smalltalk.
> I am attaching 4 files:
> - an ASCII version of the text for those who don't have VW or time to 
> go through the steps below (probably about two minutes)
> - a VisualWorks 'boss' file with the text in a fancier format (colors, etc.)
> - a .pcl and a .pst file containing a VisualWorks 'parcel' with some 
> changes to the basic classes to allow you to access the text from the 
> launcher, to load text from .bos file into a workspace, to save the 
> workspace in a file, and to use ESC c to add color to your workspace.
> 
> If you have VisualWorks (cincom.com provides a free non-commercial 
> version), proceed as follows:
> - copy the two (.pcl and .pst) parcel files into the parcels subdirectory 
> of your VW directory
> - copy the .bos file to the help subdirectory of VW
> - open a parcel brower from the launcher
> - execute 'Load' from the right-mouse popup menu of the upper left 
> view and load the parcel that you saved
> 
> You should now be able to open 'beginner's help' from the Help 
> command of the launcher.
> 
> Ivan
> 
> > david gentle wrote:
> >  
> > Okay. I've been programming computers for a while(16 years in fact).
> > I've messed around with c, c+,cobol,ada and Amiga E but I cannot
> > make head nor tail of this smalltalk stuff. Which is not to say that
> > I _should_ be able to but I need some assistance. I need some sort
> > of syntax guide so that I can make sense of the code. I keep
> > thinking that I've got it but then I try something out in the > workspace and I can't get it to work. So I need to be sure that my
> > syntax is correct. And if this isn't the correct forum for stupid
> > newbie questions can someone please direct me to it? Thanks in
> > advance. David Gentle 
> Ivan Tomek,
> Jodrey School of Computer Science
> Acadia University
> Nova Scotia, Canada
> fax: (902) 585-1067
> voice: (902) 585-1467
> e-mail: ivan.tomek at acadiau.ca