Dumb questions can have uses after all. Thank you Hannes and Ralph for your thoughtful responses. You must have been digging into the archives - my original post was nearly a year ago.
Perhaps it is time to say what I chose to do. Design of Secret Santa was driven by: 1. A desire for simplicity 2. Relatively infrequent use (annual)
Input is a text file listing the names of participants. A pair of names on the same line denotes a couple. Output consists of the result of drawing names, compiled as a class method. Method names are serialized: drawn2012, drawn2013, ...
The Transcript shows the latest drawing, as a Dictionary, which is compiled. Below that in the Transcript are the statistics (iterations, rule violations). The image must be saved.
I would appreciate any thoughts on application delivery. The above is a very crude, if not non-existent, way to deliver an app. Use of external files for output would improve things a little. Isn't it possible to do better than this for a Smalltalk app? What if the user is not a fan of computers?
- Dan