[squeak-dev] Cuis 3, some beginner questions

Mirko kapps mirkok.lists at googlemail.com
Mon Jan 17 21:51:38 UTC 2011


Hi Juan and all others.


I'm a hobby programmer (mostly Python and Bash) and play around with 
Squeak from time to time. Since a few days I play around with Cuis 
3. I hope that a smaller system will help me to understand 
Squeak/Smalltalk better and so far I really like it.

Great work! :-)


I have a few questions/issues/suggestions:

1.
I'm neither accustomed to the underscore assignment nor to the 
arrow, but somehow I like the arrow. However, it is shown for the 
underscore everywhere. I usually use underscore delimited file names 
(like "Cuis3.0_Mirko_1.image") and the arrow is shown for the file 
name too which is a little irritating. Is that intentional and how 
hard would it be to show the arrow only for assignment in code?


2.
The automatic creation of variables in the Workspace doesn't work 
even though the menu entry for it is there:

" gives an 'Unknown variable ...' menu "
m := Morph new

" gives an annoying 'm appears to be unused ...' menu, which results 
in another menu whether you say yes or no"
[ m ]
m := Morph new

I often want to instantiate some object to further play with and 
this is really annoying in my opinion. I found Juan's comment in 
Workspace>>bindingOf: that says:

	"I want to have workspace that force the user to declare
	variables. Still subclasses may want to do something else"
	
I personally don't understand why anybody wants that, but I think if 
the menu option is there, it should be supported. Is this 
intentionally, not yet implemented or a bug? And how hard would it 
be to make it work? If it isn't too hard, I would like to do it 
myself, so some pointers would be nice (how to submit changes if I 
really get it working?)


3.
The Theme system is cute! But changing the theme resets the 
background. I think, a theme should only change the background if it 
explicitly provides one, so Theme>>background shouldn't do anything. 
Instead, Theme>>beCurrent should do something like "DefaultTheme 
beCurrent". This would prevent a Theme with no background to change 
it. What do you say?


Thanks for your time and keep up the great work. :-)



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