passing cmds up from the VM, was pending mac vm 3.2.4

Marcel Weiher marcel at metaobject.com
Tue Feb 19 10:08:04 UTC 2002


On Thursday, February 14, 2002, at 08:06 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:

>> John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> is claimed by the 
>> authorities to have written:
>>
>>>  To fix this the ability to send smalltalk commands upwards from the
>>>  VM to be executed might be an interesting idea. This would require
>>>  some agreement of how to setup the cmd in the VM and some smalltalk
>>>  changes to trigger the action.
>> One way I've done this in the past is to turn them into pseudo-events
>> and pass them in via the event queue. Usually this is simple, effective
>> and extensible. Worth checking out.
>>
>
> Yes, that is what I'm proposing, but it seems comments on doing this 
> are few. Must be the olympics.

I've been wanting to do a variant of this for a while, but have so far 
shied away from the event logic.  I dd accomplish my mission the last 
time I was in there, but just barely made it back out again ;-)

Anyway, the idea is to encode message sends to objects in the image 
using events:  Maintain a table of objects and applicable messages on 
the image side that are both mapped to integers and published using 
primitives and an equivalent external mapping table (with strings 
identifying both the objects and the messages).  An external caller then 
just sends string-encoded messages to named objects, with VM support 
code mapping that to a proper event structure.

Marcel




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