Informally specifying Squeak

David Faden dfaden at mac.com
Sun Apr 14 05:19:52 UTC 2002


Hi,
    I'm considering doing an independent study project and am wondering 
how I might make the results of the project useful to the Squeak 
community.  The project would involve revising an informal specification 
of Smalltalk's key built-in types (based on Little Smalltalk) to fit 
with Squeak. The present version of the document, "Overview and 
Specification of the Built-In Types in Little Smalltalk" by Gary Leavens 
and Yoonsik Cheon, is available at 
ftp://ftp.cs.iastate.edu/pub/techreports/TR91-22/TR.ps.Z and is cached 
at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/89686.html.
    For example, Boolean's and: method is specified as follows:
and:     self: Boolean, aBlock: Block -> b: Boolean
    Requires: aBlock takes no arguments and returns a Boolean.
    Modifies at most: the objects modified by the execution of aBlock.
    Ensures: b is false if self is false; otherwise b is the result of 
evaluating aBlock.

    What could I do to make this work most useful to the Squeak community?
    How would you suggest presenting the specification? (My first 
inclination is to insert a method's specification into its comment so as 
to make the specification available from a browser.)
    Thank you.

David




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