[Squeakland] Q: Leverage Overlapping Player to Etoys?

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Tue Jan 6 22:37:00 UTC 2004


Hi Ned --

Yes, we should have aliases (shortcuts) that we can use in holders 
the way we do in variables. The name tile does do this job for 
putting an alias of a player into a player-valued variable, but I 
don't think we can generally use it in other useful places at present.

Cheers,

Alan

At 7:43 PM -0800 1/5/04, Ned Konz wrote:
>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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