Squeak-dev January 1999

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143 participants
293 discussions

Re: Re: Re: Squeak book
by sqrmax＠cvtci.com.ar 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Hi. >I think it better compares to either the people who think that the way is >the goal or the other people who just want to reach the goal. Ah yes... I meant that it has been hard to "sell" big systems in Smalltalk just because Smalltalk... well everyone knows Microsoft but Smalltalk? Oh well... :))). NRN. >When teaching Cobol-people, I >noticed that they'd severe problems with that select&action pattern of >Smalltalk. They were keyboard-centric people. Hmmmm... interesting... maybe language programmers are also very keyboard-centric... ah yes. They have to type lots more. I wouldn't believe the full sources in say C++ for all the things Squeak already has to be about 6mb... >>>The browser needs wizards to create classes and methods. >>Nahhh... >Never said that you must use them, but try to explain the funny effects >that occur if you make some errors filling out the class creation pattern. >Strange error messages or even system crashes because somebody just >redefined Class upto recompilations of the whole system can occur. :)))... yeah, it's true... but I dunno. Maybe it's better to let such errors happen because then when someone looks for the reason there's a lot to learn by oneself. >>Break points I don't know... maybe not. I guess they're most probably >Well, just because I want to stop the execution, I don't want to modify a >method and "polute" the change set. Ahh!... okok now I got you. >And again, while "normal" break points >are intuitively usable, people have to understand the full set of Smalltalk >syntax before they can correctly insert "self halt" statements. Hmmm... the morphic debugger could just replace the drawOn: for "self halt" with a fancy banner saying "BREAKPOINT"... You know, it would be nice to use self trace soTheDebuggerOpensAndYouStartTracing instead of self halt failAndThenOpenTheDebuggerAndThenStartTracing Another button for the debugger that could prove useful is the Turbo Debugger's animate feature... you just set the amount of time that goes by between execution of each instruction and watch the show... step and stepTime... >>Several attempts to obtain translated Smalltalk systems to Spanish and >>Portuguese failed miserably because of gender. >Same here in Germany. However, you misunderstood me (or I didn't make the >point clear). I just suggested a translated IDE where the browser has a >"Ausf¸hren/Ausgeben/Untersuchen" menu instead of "doit/print/inspect." Wouldn't it be neat then to rename classes and so?... then selectors?... but with the wizard browser then most details from selectors would be hidden away... I wonder what would happen with consistency. >Have you ever tried to teach Smalltalk to people who never learnt english? Yes... the names of classes and selectors I stumbled with were quite clear after a moment... for instance: OrderedCollection ColeccionOrdenada It's not that different... although the most problematic issue about syntax was gender and number... err... singular/plural stuff. Maybe I was just lucky. >Once I taught VisualWorks to some East German ladies who eventually... :)))... >Well. Now at once, it's not only a strange language where every message >selector must be learned like a strange vocabular but also the whole IDE is >alien. All other major programming languages have IDEs which are localized. I think that the IDE is more of the compile and then execute world... in Smalltalk that doesn't happen, I mean... the world is running the "IDE" let's say and the "IDE" is being used to modify the state of the world, all at the same time. On the other hand, traditional IDEs use the contents of some graves to get a new Frankenstein... ouch! :))) Just kidding. I mean that the IDEs cannot modify the world they run on because it's fixed, in some sense it's dead because it doesn't grow and it's not alive by itself. And they finally build up just another program like the IDE, running in a world that can't change. >eineCollection := Collection neu. >eineCollection tue: [:jedes | jedes anzeigeZeichenkette] >(Arg, this sounds really strange, even if it's somewhat German. :-) What does it say?... aCollection := Collection new "ok" aCollection do: "?" [:each "?" | each "?" doSomething "?"] >>Accented vowels are extremely irritating in any programming environment. So >>spelling is also broken on the way. Simple words as child, year, tomorrow, >>morning and even Spanish in Spanish contain Ò. >All I want in Squeak is, that $Ò isLetter or $· isLetter or $ isLowercase >all answer true instead of false. Okok, I meant for typing. Spanish programmers never (except some odd case which I don't know but probably exists) use accented letters for coding even in Spanish... the Ò is a bit more usual since it happens in commons words, but anyway the problem is that if you remove those away then problems arise when sharing code because of odd names chosen to avoid accented letters and Òs... >I think, that shouldn't be difficult to >add. As Western European, I'm happy with Squeak default font which >resembles ISO Latin1 (I don't know), but I can hear the complains of >Russians (not talking about people of Far and Near East) who demand their >letters. Perhaps the best solution would be to switch to Unicode. Although I admit it would be quite personal, I'd love to use the TeX fonts for Concrete Mathematics... :). I wrote a TeX fileOut little package a while ago, to file out Smalltalk code in TeX format so it would look nice. Has someone here done a TeX compiler to dvi or something??? I think that there was something done already. Maybe I can use it to play with TeX math objects in Morphic... Andres.

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Re: SqueakOS
by johnm＠wdi.disney.com 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Thanks for the interesting info and pointers. The one thing I wonder about is how you get something like OSKit to boot instead of Win 95. On a machine with a disk, it may be merely a matter of changing the boot blocks of the disk. But my real interest in a portable OS is for hardware like the latest crop of WinCE machines which don't have hard disks. They boot from a ROM that's probably soldered to the board. How can one "take over" such a machine with a custom OS? It could be impossible, especially if the OS in ROM turns on memory protection. The Compaq Itsy is nice because it is a semi-open hardware platform. They give all the hardware specs you need to write drivers, and they have a way to load new OS kernels into the boot "ROM" (Flash RAM, actually). Unfortunately, this is still a research project and Itsy's are not available unless you happen to be at one the Universities that they are collaborating with. -- John

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2.3beta can't read .files?
by Mark Guzdial 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

I can't read any files in Squeak 2.3beta that are prefixed with a period. Squeak 2.2 does it fine. I couldn't see where the problem was in 2.3Beta. Any ideas? Thanks! Mark -------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

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Squeak: tools for generating machine code
by Paul Fernhout 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Squeakers - There was a recent thread on gnu.misc.discuss: "Looking for an 'assembler generator' utility" that lead to these links. Perhaps Squeak might be able to leverage this work for native code generation (and to make Squeak independent of C). http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nr/toolkit/ "The New Jersey Machine-Code Toolkit helps programmers write applications that process machine code---assemblers, disassemblers, code generators, tracers, profilers, and debuggers. The toolkit lets programmers encode and decode machine instructions symbolically. Encoding and decoding are automated based on compact specifications. The toolkit is a joint project of Mary Fernández and Norman Ramsey." This work is in ML, but why not Squeak? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nr/toolkit/examples/xs/xs.html A simple example of The New Jersey Machine-Code Toolkit in action http://www.cs.virginia.edu/zephyr/ "Zephyr: Tools for a National Compiler Infrastructure" Squeak seems like a great platform to host (incremental) compilers. I'm not sure what the licensing terms are for these works. http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/c--.html "The trouble is that C was designed as a programming language not as a compiler target language, and is not very suitable for the latter purpose. The obvious thing to do is to define a language that is designed as a portable target language. " http://www.fsf.org/software/gcc/gcc.html And of course, there is always the GCC technology base. -Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the GPL Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com

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Re: Squeak: Events, Modularity, Exceptions
by Ted Wrinch 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Paul said: >Some people, like myself, are in both camps at various times. Perhaps >this is common. Obviously, being able to justify Squeak use to >management for grungy apps (like processing text files) would get it in >the door for other fancier uses. Does this make sense at all? Is the >second camp (or sentiment) present on this list to any extent? Am I the >only one out here thinking Squeak could become an acceptable scripting >language up there with Perl, TCL, and Python/TK? I would think many >people would adore feeding program/text files to Squeak which were >written in their favorite text editor (David Pennell brings this issue >up in a recent "Re: Squeak book" post). >As something to be concerned about, when the bulk of newbies show up as >Squeak gets more publicity, I'd think they would expect Squeak to do the >boring stuff, even if they other stuff (Morphic, Music, Wiki, Web, VM) >wows them. But if Squeak can't do the boring stuff (i.e. the stuff >Delphi does, VB does, C++ does, Python does), potential converts may not >stick around (unless they got faith, like me :-). They certainly will >have a hard time being able to convince their supervisor to use it for >utilities or apps. I could'nt agree more with all of this. Two recent run-of-the-mill experiences suggest that if Squeak's inter-operability with other languages / environments was improved it might get greater currency as a scripting / application development enviroment itself: 1) I recently tried to use Squeak as a grungy text processing replacement for the UNIX Awk and Sed tools (which wer'nt up to it). My problem was that our team had no experience of / were not interested in other languages like Squeak but would have accepted a packaged solution with a command line interface. I could provide all of this using headless Squeak, except for the output of results or errors to 'stdout' or 'stderr' (the former goes to the squeak console window). 2) It would have been nice on the same project to have used Squeak to extend the 'legacy' C++ code. To support this however does require, as Paul says,: ' being able to call in and call out of the system in a coherent fashion'. Re-writing existing stuff is rarely an option but doing new bits / improving the old stuff in a new language can be viable if the above functionality is available (probably including the ability to import and read foreign data structures). Regards, Ted Wrinch

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Re: Modularity & Parsing
by Ralph Johnson 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

One thing to "factor in" to any discussion of parsing in Smalltalk is the Refactoring Browser. We reimplemented the Smalltalk parser and have it running in VisualWorks, VisualAge, and Squeak. The RB is built upon a pattern matching engine that we use to analyze and modify Smalltalk code. It is entirely syntax based, which means that it just matches abstract syntax trees. It comes with a pretty good formatter, too. The parser is not tied into a code generator. This means that if it were to be used for the main parser, the optimization and code generation would have to be rewritten. It would probably be a lot of work. However, in the long run it doesn't make sense to have two parsers in the system, so they need to be unified, and we think that our abstract syntax system is cleaner than the others we've seen, and is just as fast. -Ralph

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Modularity & Parsing
by Leslie Tyrrell 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Nice taunts, Paul! I've outlined my own ideas about modularity before, so instead of talking about the technology ( which would be better done with a web site ) I'm going to talk about what I actaully intend to do about it. Hopefully, this will be better than all the previous discussions where I've mentioned all this before, but haven't gone very far with it. First, what I am actually working on in a Squeak-specific sense: Formatting. This is good becuase people want it, and because it gets me down into parts of Squeak which I need to modify in order to do other things for the main interest, Modularity. It's also good because I'm actually working in Squeak, building the infrastructure I'll need later, rather than working in VisualWorks, building things that have to stand on that infrastructure. The tie-in with Modularity comes in the analysis of legacy source code- I need a visitor framework for my stuff to work. I need the analysis capability in order to work on schemes for automatic extraction of the object interfaces, which I feel I need in order to do modules right. I'll start putting together a web page for this so interested parties can get involved. The mods I'm doing to support formatting involve fairly substantial changes down in the parser framework. I'd appreciate hearing from others working on building or modifying the parser framework, otherwise we're all going to step on each other's toes. In particular, Cragi Latta, you have mentioned that you are working on this, and I am also aware of Hal Hildebrand's Loki work. Loki is in many ways siimilar to what I want, but not qute., and the change set that is available bothers me in a few areas. At this time I intend to stay somewhat with the existing Squeak parser framework, but decompse it along lines similar to Loki. Getting back to modules, the story on that is that I have code sketching out bits of it, but my belief is that the modules are not the hard part. Instead, dealing with legacy code is, and that is why I am working on the analysis stuff, and why I need the visitor framework for the parse nodes, and why I'm bothering with that and doing the formatting to boot. I know about Modular Smalltalk, from the original publications as well as from a thesis on the topic, so I'll keep that in mind as I go. If possible, I will try to get these documents along with my own scheme onto a single web site for interested parites. What I need out of the analysis stuff is the ability to find out what a given module needs in order to work. This includes named things, such as 'global' variables ( or, in the context of modules, externally defined variables and such ) and a specification of what a given module expects out of the objects that enter and leave it. The first is easier, and that is mostly working now. The last part is the hard one, but I have a start on that. I'll work on writing out a better overview of the things I'm doing, and on getting the web site up. When this is ready, I'll send a message to the list. les

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Re: How difficult is multiple inheritance?
by Dwight Hughes 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

Xerox PARC is starting to put some of its blue and white papers online: http://www.parc.xerox.com/publications/pubs-hst.html They only have a few available for viewing right now, but a number more are promised. -- Dwight "Andrew C. Greenberg" wrote: > > So how do we find these papers?

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Linux memory issues resolved?
by Brian 04 Jan '99

04 Jan '99

After searching the Squeak archives and related websites, I have found no definitive answer as to the "out of memory" problem some folks (including me) seem to be experiencing. My system is running the 2.0.35 kernel, XFree86 3.3.2, 64M of RAM. I can't seem to get through the first few examples of Chris Phoenix's tutorial before the VM warns I'm almost out of memory, then just crashes. The VM appears to take up anywhere between 12M and 18M on startup, which still leaves about 18M available on my system. Is anybody actually running Squeak on a similar configuration? On a related note, I couldn't get the pre-compiled VM exec to run, so I compiled my own (after figuring out how to get around 'make mkdir' deleting the very makefile it was trying to read). With all four files in the same directory (VM, image, changes, source), I get an error message telling me the change file can't be found. Is there some environment or compile-time variable I need to be setting before firing up the VM? --Brian

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VW: Artbase OODBMS by ArtinApples experiance?
by Heinz-Geerd Neumann 03 Jan '99

03 Jan '99

Hello, could anybody report about experiance with ARTBASE, an OODBMS written extirely in ST-80 / VW by a company called "ArtinApples" in Bratislava (Slovakia), please? I am looking for a DB system to give objects persistance and to avoid "squeezing nice round objects into an ugly square relational database". Also it must be run-time royalty free. I got to know it in 94, when it was still under development and very slow. That's not the problem, but I wonder about stability of the system since the author company does not seem to be very successful and I have not yet heard of anybody using this system. Thus, I would be very grateful about any comment and experiance. Best regards from Berlin Heinz-Geerd Neumann hgn(a)lasercat.de

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