[Squeakland] Where can I find a description of make siblings

[Scott Wallace]

Hi, Stéphane, and all,

>Is there somewhere a description of the difference between copy and 
>make siblings?

Thank you for this reminder!  Here's a first draft of an explanation; 
in this form, it will probably only be intelligible to people already 
familiar with the concepts of class and instance, but I hope this 
provides a useful point of departure.


There are two different kinds of "copying" available in the morphic 
etoy user-interface, here for convenience called "make-deep-copy" and 
"make-sibling-instance."

Both of these create clones of the original object, with exactly the 
same appearance, structure, state, and behavior.

The main difference is that a "deep-copy" has no ongoing affinity to 
the original, so that no code or structure change to the original 
will affect the copy in any way, and conversely no change to the copy 
will affect the original, whereas a "sibling-instance" is another 
instance of the original's uniclass, so that when you add, delete or 
change any script in either one, the change is instantly felt by the 
other (and by all other siblings,) and when you add, delete, rename, 
or change the type of an instance variable of any one, the structural 
change is immediately propagated to all of its siblings.

Another difference is that there are various scripting commands (in 
the "scripting" category of a Viewer) and scripting controls ("apply 
my status to all siblings" menu command available in the "when should 
this script run" menu of any script, as seen in a viewer, scriptor, 
or other tool) which allow communications to be made to all siblings. 
These apply only to true siblings, and not at all to copies, no 
matter how similar, made via the bright-green "duplicate" halo handle.

Though as usual we thirst for better names, arguably both ways of 
manufacturing a new object by copying from an existing one are needed.

There are various ways a user can obtain each kind of copy; here are 
a few that have "always" been available (i.e for at least the last 
five years) and are still available in exactly the same ways in 3.8:

To get a "deep-copy":
*  Drag from the bright-green halo handle.
*  Choose "duplicate" from the "halo actions" submenu of the red halo menu.

To get a "sibling instance":
*  Choose "make a sibling instance" or "make multiple siblings" from 
the "siblings" submenu of the red halo menu.
*  Open a viewer on the object (e.g. Car), go to the "miscellaneous" 
category of the Viewer, and find the "Car's copy" phrase and then...
-	Choose "give me a copy now" from the phrase's menu.
-	Or run a script containing a "Car's copy" phrase.

-------

Notice that in the above, the only kind of copy obtainable directly 
from a halo handle has been the "deep-copy" of the bright green 
handle, whereas the only kind of copy obtainable from an etoy script 
or viewer is a "sibling-instance", which has had no halo-handle 
counterpart.

In practice, once you have scripted a morph (i.e. given it variables 
or scripts or both,) what you almost always actually want, when you 
want a copy, is a sibling instance, rather than a deep-copy.  So it 
has always been a problem that the bright green "duplicate" handle is 
so tantalizingly beckoning in the halo, whereas make-sibling-instance 
has had to be fished for in a submenu of a menu.

The change made in 3.8 is that once an object has been *scripted*, 
the halo handle seen at the top-right of its halo will now be an 
olive colored handle whose operation makes a sibling-instance rather 
than a deep-copy.

Note that the deep-copy alternative is still always available, via 
"halo actions... duplicate", it's just that you have to fish for it 
in the menu of a scripted object, just like you have to fish for the 
make-sibling alternatives in the menu of an unscripted object.

This is obviously not a perfect solution, but it does now make the 
most-likely-desired duplication operation be the easiest one to 
obtain, while making the alternative operation still available from 
the halo menu.

Cheers,

  -- Scott

At 9:33 AM +0100 12/22/04, stéphane ducasse wrote:
>hi
>
>I was showing to a teacher how to use make siblings and we were 
>confused by the behavior.
>Is there somewhere a description of the difference between copy and 
>make siblings.
>Apparently the behavior (duplicate) changed between 3.6-3.7 and 3.8. 
>in 3.8 this is now make siblings by default.
>I checked a bit and it seems that indeed all the siblings are 
>sharing the same behavior and the variables are local to each object.
>
>So one teacher asked me how to get back the default copy behavior I 
>browsed in the halos menus but I could not find that anymore. So 
>what is the status of the makesibling/copy behavior? Is copy simply 
>deprecated (which makes sense to me).
>
>Stef