On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Christopher Roach wrote:

> I am just thinking here... will smalltalk do a comparison on each 
> letter at a time?  so lets say we have:
> 
> aaaa
> compared to:
> aaab  does smalltalk go through first a's and compare it, then move 
> onto second a, compare that, until it gets to the fourth THEN it 
> realizes that they are different and moves on?  

Yes. It compares both character by character until it finds a difference.

> The code that Bert gave:
> 
> order := [:a :b | 
>   a title < b title or: [
>     a title = b title and: [a name < b name or: [
>       a name = b name and: [a ref < b ref or: [
>         a number < b number]]]]]]
> 
> Does this in effect just get the first two characters of the field 
> and do a comparison?  yeah?  the words "title" and "name" and all 
> that in this method - does that make a difference?  how does 
> smalltalk regard that? 

Sorry, I did not know just how new you are to Squeak.

> could it just be:
> 
> order := [:a :b | 
>   a  < b  or: [
>     a  = b  and: [a  < b  or: [
>       a  = b  and: [a  < b  or: [
>         a  < b ]]]]]]
> 

No, that would make no sense.

> Can you produce a record in smalltalk like in C++, so it could be 
> something like:
> 
> Struct
> {
> char[] name,
> char [] title,
> char [] ref,
> int number
> }

Yes, that is what I assumed you were doing. Both a and b in my code were
objects that had title, name, ref, and number members, just like your
struct. Explaining how to do this would take a while. You should work
through this tutorial:

	http://www.squeak.org/tutorials/BankAccount.html

In C terms, the tutorial creates a struct that holds information on a bank 
account:

struct {
  int balance;
  int history[];
}

After that, you should be able to define your own class. 

-- Bert