Learning Squeak
ducasse
ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Jan 21 08:23:54 UTC 2002
I ****agree 200 % with les ****
> This was done once before in either ObjectWorks or VisualWorks. Look for
> "Literate Smalltalk Programming Using Hypertext", by Kasper Østerbye.
> However, I don't think that the code was made available ( if it had been, I
> would surely have archived it back in my pack-rat days ). Still, perhaps it
> might be found at the UIUC Smalltalk archive.
>
> Keeping documentation consistent with an evolving code base is a bit hard. In
> Squeak, class comments don't get very much attention, probably as much due to
> the way the browsers operate as anything else. In order to see a class
> comment, you have to do a small bit of extra work, whereas to see code all you
> have to do is make a few mouse clicks that are probably nearly instinctive to
> the Squeak programmer anyway. If the browsers were configured to show the
> class comment whenever reasonably possible ( for instance, perhaps any time
> that a class is selected but a method is not ) then maybe they would get more
> attention. As an example, I've attached some methods for Browser that I just
> wrote for Squeak 2.2 that do something like this.
>
> I think that once class comments are given more apparent visibility, then one
> might start thinking about attaching meta-information ( computed or manually
> created ) to things like system or method categories, as well as to methods
> and classes.
>
> Later on, perhaps another route to this would be through Aspect-Oriented
> Programming, for which AOP/st ( or similar name ) has been written for
> VisualWorks. Perhaps the documentation could be another thread to weave
> alongside the code.
>
> - les
>
>
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