Civil Modularity (Re: Smalltalk & Squeak featured on Slashdot)

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Sun Apr 22 05:50:35 UTC 2001


On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Les Tyrrell wrote:

> 
> Howdy Bijan!

Howdy Les!

> > That being said, and in an effort to practice more and preach less, I
> > know, off hand, of 4 proposed designs in various degrees of flux and
> > instantiation:

Hmm. "Design" might be two strong, since some of the things are more
implementational (EPISS, for example, which I really hope catches on as a
name :), could be the substrate (and, Image Segments, in fact, *are* a
substrate) of a number of different things.

> > 1) Oasis, which, IIRC, is mostly a SandBox sort of thing. Perhaps
> > Lex's security stuff comes here or at least might aide and abet
> > an Oasis like design. (Code wise, I understand most of what
> > you have is VisualWorks based, yes? I'm unclear how much
> > it would take to move it to Squeak.)
[snip]

> From what I've seen from working on Oasis, I believe that all four of
> these have a role in the ultimate solution.

Well, I expect that ideas, at least, and bits of code, definitately :)

>  More on this later. (
> BTW, there is a bit more to Oasis than what you mention, but that will
> also have to wait for a better explanation ).

Modularity-wise? I remember the code analysis stuff...search search
search...

Aha!

	http://oasis.canis.uiuc.edu:8080/XOasis/What+is+Oasis%3F

(D'oh! I forgot you had all that Xanadu stuff. Man! Dump Frost! :))

Hmm. I guess I should mention the FileContentsBrowser too, which is let's
you "FileIn" a changeset or .st file without loading it into the system,
so you can browse and selectively file in stuff. One of my favorite tools!

What made me think of this was:

"""Oasis currently has an inert version of the standard Smalltalk kernel
of Behavior, Class, Metaclass, etc. In the inert model classes cannot
instantiate and the methods cannot execute. However, it retains enough
fidelity to be compatible with the analytical tools within Oasis that
expect a standard model as their subject. These tools are therefore able
to operate over either inert or active models of Smalltalk systems. The
analytical tools in Oasis are not dependent upon any particular
modularization scheme, aside from asking whatever environment is of
interest for all of its (defined) classes. """

Tools-File Contents Browser category has some "inert" classes, e.g.,
PsuedoClass, PseudoClassOrganizer, PseudoMetaclass which work well enough
to be browsable. I take it that this is similar to that bit of Oasis you
describe in the above quote? I'd be interested to know what the gap in
funcationality is (one thing, I suspect, is that you can't actually edit
anything in the File Contents Browser...and, of course, whatever other
nifty tools you might have are missing, but I suspect that editing is the
key bit).

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.





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