> joshscholar at nightstudies.net wrote:
>> Me too. I've yet to find a good reference for all of the standard  
>> classes.
>> I don't need or want tutorials, I just want a thorough reference.
It's not possible to have a 'thorough reference' other than the  
system itself. As soon as you add, delete or edit a method - which of  
course happens any time you load a package - it would be out of date  
and no longer thorough.

A static bit of paper or pdf is essentially useless as soon as it is  
written when referring to a dynamic system. You can, certainly, have  
a fairly static description of the *language* Smalltalk since that  
doesn't change much. It would be short and not terribly helpful much  
of the time since you could memorize it in no time. A page or two at  
most, about as long as a list of C precedence rules.

Almost any of the classic Smalltalk books on Stephan's site will have  
a decent level of reasonable-reference material but it will be  
incomplete for the Squeak system. Tough luck I'm afraid. Live with  
it. The only plausible reference is the system as it exists while you  
are examining it.  Any other way involves that quaint old-fashioned  
idiocy so beloved of the java-weenies, C++ chumps and other dinosaurs  
- sourcecode in files. I mean, what an idea. So last century.

What we can have, should have and pretty much don't have is decent  
friggin' comments as to what classes are intended for, how they are  
implemented and their limitations, along with comments in the code to  
give some decent level of meaning. Comments in the system can be (but  
usually aren't) kept up to date. Better yet we could develop tools to  
replace the current browsers that make writing code more like writing  
documentation that has the implementation included as it goes, what  
my friend Dan Lanovaz refers to as a software book.  But then we'd  
get complaints from the sort of plonkers that claim 'oh, my code is  
so clearly written that it needs no comments'. Gits.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: JUM: Jeer at User's Mistake