On Thursday 28 November 2002 12:51 am, Hernan Galante wrote:
> He don't like "strutured" programs like Mathematica or to
> experiencie problems with languajes like Fortran. I think it will
> be very useful to have:
>
> Morph   subclass: #BioMorph
>         objectKnowledge: ' myTarget lastTime '
>         classMembersKnowledge: ' CloseBoxImage '
>         dictionaryOfVocableKnows: 'Colors '
>         category: 'Morphic-Samples'!

This is more a tool problem than anything else, as it relates to the 
user's (in this case a programmer's) view of the system. If you want 
to write tools that present things in this way, it would be easy to 
do.

That said, though, don't you think that defining classes (or 
displaying their definitions) in this way is a bit primitive? It 
seems like you could do better in a tool than to display this kind of 
text.

As for the terminology issue, teachers are welcome to use whatever 
terms they want to describe concepts. The existence of phrases like 
"instance variable" in the code and comments can be explained however 
they want.

Personally, I agree with Richard, partly due to my own understanding 
and partly in deference to his much greater knowledge of computer 
languages. To me, a variable in Squeak is a named reference to an 
object. That this name->object association can be changed is what 
makes it a variable. This is no different from the concept of 
variables in most other popular languages.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE