On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Lex Spoon wrote:

> Islands is principled and minimal.  I've gone down this path that you
> are talking about, and believe me I've only included things that are
> necessary.  Give it a try!

Lex,

I realize you've spent more time on this than anyone else, so I was
hoping you'd comment :).
I probably would just use Islands if it loaded clean into a recent Squeak
image, but I don't think moving this work into 2.8 is realistic.  However,
I think you underestimate how little I need: I'm asking users to write
extremely simple single methods in a tutorial, and numbers and strings may
well be all they use.  For example, early in the tutorial users are
encouraged to modify the method

increment
  count := count + 1

In this case, allowing the assignment and arithmetic expressions is about
all I need.  Later on, there may be certain objects passed in whose
protocol they'll get to explore (think Canvas), but I'm a long way from
needing arbitrary secure code.  I think what Tim needed was similar - he
essentially wanted to use Smalltalk code as a way of expressing algebraic
equations.

And of course I'm not looking for perfect security.  If they trash the
image, they trash the image - it's just a tutorial.  If they somehow find
their way to the file system and trash the user account, well, they trash
the user account.  But I'd like to at least discourage such things (great,
now if I ever do put this up, everyone is going to take it as a
challenge...)

Avi