Trouble Getting adjusted to Smalltalk

Alan Mortensen mortea at alum.rpi.edu
Tue Oct 23 20:05:13 UTC 2001


Sorry to be slow on the response.. I'm on digest here.

I understood most of what was being said and no techie-speak doesn't 
scare me off, once you OD in grad school you develop a tolerance :).  I 
guess it just seems really slow compared to seeing:
void setBounds(Rectangle aBounds);
and then you see:
public Rectangle(int x, int y, int width, int height);

I realize the Smalltalk way is a lot more flexible.  I guess I just have 
to get used to it (plus documenting code a little more wouldn't hurt, 
jab, jab :)  I also think the rectangle example was a bad place to start 
because of terminology.. I've never seen the term extent used like that.

BTW, to give you a newbie's experience here (well newbie to Smalltalk 
anyway), I'll give you what I was doing.  I looked at the methods bodies 
to see what they did with the parameters and I looked up any methods 
inside the original methods body with method finder (if the original 
method passed the parameter on).  Never thought of who else calls the 
original method (can't usually do that easily:)

Oh another newbie observation, I've noticed most methods have a lot 
fewer arguments than in Java or C++.  From what I understand that's a 
good goal for object oriented design, is that it or is there another 
Smalltalkish reason?

Thanks for the support on my original question, now I know I'm not crazy 
and missing something obvious, it's just a different technique,
Alan





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