Brian T Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> Would someone be kind enough to produce ascii-text (or at least
> non-binary) versions of the Strongtalk sources, since I don't have a
> readily-handy new Windows machine, and the Strongtalk system
> is totally
> unusable on older Windows versions? (I gave up after the
> hundredth blue
> screen.)
>
> I'm working on a new language, and want to incorporate the
> best ideas that
> I can into my collection hierarchy. I've already ported and augmented,
> trimmed, and modified Squeak's collection types, but without
> real access
> to Strongtalk, there are some aspects of this that aren't apparent.
>

Hi Brian,

Let me think about the best way to accomplish this.  It would be easy to
just file-out the Strongtalk collection classes, but that wouldn't be
file-in-able on any other Smalltalk, and isn't that great a read by
itself ;-).  I've been considering a compatibility-fileout, but there
still would be lots of name clashes without namespaces or something, and
I would also have to do ugly things like expand mixins etc to make it
work, which would destroy some structure.

It is a such damn shame that the system has become so unstable on
Win95/98.  It wasn't always that way- the system was developed on Win95
and NT, and I used to run it all day long on 95 with maybe a crash a day
or something (we were doing all our coding in the programming
environment at that point, so it obviously *had* to be stabler than it
is now).  Changes that were made at Sun (not with my approval) just
before release to recompile and slightly clean up the VM seem to have
resulted in this instability, and I did not have a chance to test it
after those changes :-(.  I hoped most programmers would have access to
XP by now, where it runs much better (altho still not as well as it
originally did), but I guess in the Smalltalk community that hasn't
happened.

I'll get back to you.

Cheers,
Dave