[Squeakland] Q: Leverage Overlapping Player to Etoys?

Ned Konz ned at squeakland.org
Tue Jan 6 03:43:19 UTC 2004


On Monday 05 January 2004 2:59 pm, Alan Kay wrote:
> >>  Is it a problem that we only
> >>  return one of possible many overlapped players?
> >
> >How would you return more than one?
> >
> >I've been thinking about making a CollectionPlayer that can apply commands
> > and slot setters to its members; if we had one of these it could be
> > returned. However, there's a problem with slot getters, and with the
> > display of such a collection (what should it look like if it's visible?).
>
> It should look like (and be) a Holder.

Hard to do, as the Holders assume that they're owners of their morphs.

Perhaps if they (visually) presented themselves as an overlay on the World we 
wouldn't have to make that distinction.

The way it is now, though, if you say

	Holder include: SomeMorph

and then say

	Holder2 include: SomeMorph

you will see SomeMorph jump from Holder to Holder2. Having a Holder that held 
onto aliases to morphs owned by other morphs would be inconsistent with this 
behavior.

I've often wanted to be able to refer to morphs that are owned by other morphs 
without changing their owners.

A good example is wanting to be able to say:

	Fred's incomingConnections tellAll: 'whatever'.

One possible solution to some of the more limited problems is to have a method 
that does:

	Fred's incomingConnectionsTellAll: 'whatever'

and then the collection itself is never available to eToys.

But this isn't a general solution.



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