squeak printing?
Lex Spoon
lex at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Feb 8 23:39:18 UTC 2002
>
> I'll go one further -- perhaps we should be thinking about remodelling
> the FileStream and FileDirectory objects so that they can directly
> support these kind of abstractions, whether or not the operating system
> does? Perhaps something along the lines of, but more tractable than,
> Styx in the Lucifer system? If we imposed our own file-system model on
> the corpus of system resources, might we be able to provide, with proper
> refactoring, for a more robust --and more readily extensible-- system?
>
> If we did that, we could begin with trivial "drivers" as pluggable
> primitives, and build thereupon in Smalltalk code -- the very model that
> worked so well for the rest of Squeak.
I guess the idea is, Squeak would have an internal naming system to
handle its global data. Instead of just plopping things on a desktop or
in flaps, you could save them by stashing them into the image-wide
directory tree. The filesystem of the underlying OS could be mounted in
this hierarchy somewhere. Probably, the WWW should be mounted
underneath it as well. :)
One concern is that we might be overdoing it. There are only 5-10
global variables other than classes in Squeak right now. Do we need a
hierarchical naming system for this? Are we engaging in premature
generalization?
Anyway, what would the polymorphic methods be? acceptObject: ?
acceptMorph: ? acceptText: ? retrieveObject/Morph/Text ?
isDirectory? Would a path now be an array of symbols, like in the
module system? (And, would the modules hierarchy be mounted in this
hierarchy, too?)
-Lex
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