Hi Christoph,

> Yeah, we were also having a similar discussion about automatic declarations in inspectors and other tools. I'm not sure what behavior I would expect here. On the one hand, this is just convenient, but on the other hand, would it confuse anyone?

Thanks for your explanation why not automatic declarations. From purely beginner's view I'd argue it's unclear how to use the Terse guide in its current form other than just "read it":

- line by line evaluation is almost impossible (most of the lines have assignments so they won't evaluate without a declaration)
- selecting a chunk of code from the declarations at the beginning to the line I'd like to print-it sounds ridiculous and utterly confusing ;)
What remains?
- copy the line I'm interested in into Worspace
- copy the whole thing into Workspace
- copy variable declarations and their initial values to each line I'd like to evaluate
- ???

If automatic declarations are not an option, how about to add an option to export the current chapter to a new Workspace? 
Maybe something as simple as a link to
Workspace open contents: TerseGuideHelp character contents 

What do you think?

best, 
Jaromir
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On 2022-02-07T12:24:24+00:00, christoph.thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de wrote:

> Hi Jaromir,
> 
> 
> > Would you be interested in a quick review of these?
> 
> ...
> 
> > If you're interested I could also add a few more Exceptions examples.
> 
> Sure, both would be very helpful of course! Please just make sure to contribute small independent versions so that we can easily review and merge them. :-)
> 
> > I'm not sure why the Terse guide doesn't behave like a Workspace: I mean automatic declarations. It's not straightforward to print-it or inspect the examples line by line; for a beginner running them feels scary - if you select just the line you're interested in, it shouts unknown variable and if you accept, the modified Terse guide is half purple (in the Dark mode).
> 
> Yeah, we were also having a similar discussion about automatic declarations in inspectors and other tools. I'm not sure what behavior I would expect here. On the one hand, this is just convenient, but on the other hand, would it confuse anyone? Especially in inspectors/explorers, there might be clashes with existing instance variables. Maybe users would struggle to distinguish between their own "workspace" state and the actual state that is part of a receiver. We also would need to give users access to the bindings (inspect/reset) as it is possible at the moment via the workspace menu. Another issue is that automatic declarations are just not "true plain Smalltalk", so when you want to convert it into a method, you will need to define the variables yourself ...
> 
> Best,
> Christoph
> 
> ________________________________
> Von: Squeak-dev <squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org> im Auftrag von mail at jaromir.net <mail at jaromir.net>
> Gesendet: Sonntag, 6. Februar 2022 16:16:42
> An: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Betreff: [squeak-dev] Terse Guide's a bit outdated and contains errors
> 
> Hi Marcel, all,
> 
> I've noticed the Terse Guide is a bit outdated and contains some errors and inconsistencies. Would you be interested in a quick review of these?
> 
> To name a few:
> 1. Under General - Allowable characters name symbols like "blank" and "ff" which I guess are not being used any longer. It's also not clear what these symbols are supposed to be allowable for - variable declarations??
> 2. Under Constants - x := 2e-2 is it a fractional constant? Or a float constant? It's confusing what (1/50) is then :)
> 3. Under Method Call - missing declaration of anArray
> 
> I'm not sure why the Terse guide doesn't behave like a Workspace: I mean automatic declarations. It's not straightforward to print-it or inspect the examples line by line; for a beginner running them feels scary - if you select just the line you're interested in, it shouts unknown variable and if you accept, the modified Terse guide is half purple (in the Dark mode).
> 
> If you're interested I could also add a few more Exceptions examples.
> 
> 
> best,
> Jaromir
> ^[^
>   --
> Sent from Squeak Inbox Talk
> 
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