Hi all--

	Russell writes:

> > My plan is to have nearly everything written in Squeak with very
> > basic primitives, that way it allows more control...

	David writes:

> If you're going to do a complete rewrite, it would also be good to
> generalize the notion of an I/O channel for files, sockets, pipes,
> or whatever other external resources can be modeled in this way.

	I've done this with Flow ( http://netjam.org/flow ). I originally wrote
it in 1997, first released it in 1998, and have been trying to get it
into Squeak ever since, without much success. :)  I've also spoken with
both of you about it before, so I'm a little surprised it hasn't been
mentioned in this conversation before now (not upset, just a little
surprised :). I'm especially surprised that Tim didn't mention it, since
he sat next to me while I implemented most of the MIDI support. :)

	While Flow hasn't been widely adopted yet, it has had some influence,
e.g., on the "network rewrite" that Michael Rueger did, distinguishing
streams from their resources.

	The current release features support for writing socket-based clients
and servers, and for using files, speech synthesis and recognition,
serial ports, and parallel ports. I've also written (but not yet
released) support for bidirectional streams on MIDI ports, which I have
found to be a lot of more convenient interface than the standard one.
I'm also working on support for digital audio, firewire, USB and IR.

	Flow is used by Squat ( http://netjam.org/squat ), a minimal Squeak
system (minimal snapshot, minimal virtual machine, and module system
using live peer-to-peer negotiation). The current release of Squat has a
complete URI implementation with tests, written by asparagi.

	For the record, I've mentioned all of this on this mailing list
(squeak-dev) multiple times. :)  I was holding off a little this week
because I'm in the middle of renaming Squat to "Spoon", and I didn't
want to cause any unnecessary confusion. 'Sorry if I've been too quiet,
I've been working hard on this stuff instead of writing email... I guess
one needs to say *something* to the list at least every few weeks, just
so people still think you're alive. :)


	thanks!

-C

p.s.

	Russell, I've made encouraging noises about your Ogg implementation
before, albeit on the the Squeak IRC channel and not on the squeak-dev
list. :)  Good work! While I'm at it... thanks, David, for CommandShell;
I use it frequently. :)

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
craig at netjam.org
www.netjam.org
[|] Proceed for Truth!