Hi all

 
Just a quick couple of questions (nothing serious).

 
I was going through the SBE and came up on OrderedCollections. I tried the following:

 
c := OrderedCollection newFrom: { 1. 5. 8. 45. 23. 3. 20 }.
String newFrom: c

 
but I get the following: 'Error: Improper store into indexable object'. What I was expecting was:

 
1584523320 (because in Ruby world I can do something like this:)

 
irb(main):001:0> [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8].to_s
=> "12345678"
irb(main):002:0>

 
I was at least expecting something weird but not an error.

 
I eventually figured that it was because I was using Ints instead of Characters because this works fine:

 
str := OrderedCollection newFrom: { $a. $g. $t. $e }.
str as: String

 
So, the question is why do I get the error? Shouldn't String be able to convert any object into a String representation? In Rubylandwhere that's all fair game but I get the feeling that you can't just do that since it is String doing the conversion by (possibly) sending a message that OrderedCollection does not support. If that's the case, how do you do it?

 
The second question is kinda stupid. I was playing around with the browser in Squeak (I had just learned how to open Morphs in the World. Yay!) and tried this:

 
anEllipse := EllipseMorph new.
anEllipse defaultColor.
anEllipse openInWorld

 
anEllipse color: Color red
anEllipse borderWidth: 10
anEllipse height: 100
100 timesRepeat: [randomNo := 100 atRandom. anEllipse height: randomNo. anEllipse borderWidth: anEllipse borderWidth + 1 ]

 
It did work but it did the moves all at once. At first I thought that it was just doing it so quick I couldn't see but I increased the number of iterations but all that did was hang the UI for a sec or so and then leave the ellipse at a random location (as expected). I guess I was trying to animate it but the UI doesn't update. Is it a block thing? That is, is it that the block is evaluated and then the UI is updated? Just curious. I'm probably trying to do this in a rather silly way.

 
Anyhoo, that's it. I'm loving it so far and I've ordered the Seaside book from Lulu. Even if I don't ever get to use this officially in my work, I'm glad I found it because I will now be able to write tools very quickly and easily AND move them between platforms with a quick scp or anything else for that matter..

 
Sven