Squeak-dev February 2000

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163 participants
655 discussions

Not my night or what?
by Charles-A. Rovira 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

I just went to the site ( ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/2.7/Squeak2.7-mac.sea.bin ) to pick up a new copy of Squeak for my Mac. (I'm about to start experimenting with PWS and making some CGI responses. Wish me luck... I'll undoubtedy need it, that and some beer and some Oreo cookies (tomorrow morning's "Breakfast of Champions"!) There's an eof error on the .sea.bin. (It seems to be okay other then that.) Stil. I get hear palpitations when things like that happen so you might want to look into that file... -Charles-A.

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Re: [Q] Looking for any CRC design tools in squeak
by Robert Withers 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

Rick Zaccone wrote: > > >Does anyone know of such a tool? > > Mark Guzdial has a CRC morph: > > http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu:8888/cs2340/uploads/crcmorphs.cs > > Rick Zaccone > -- > zaccone(a)bucknell.edu Ahh! Thanks man! I was wondering if it wasn't in my ramblings through all the great material there. cheers, Rob -- -------------------------------------------------- Smalltalking by choice. Isn't it nice to have one!

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RE: VM pluginisation and misc primitives
by Raab, Andreas 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

Tim, > If one is trying to move everything plausible to plugins, there > is an urge to have all the prim code within the plugin hierarchy, > rather than scattered about in FMSound etc. Ah! I see. Sorry - that was a total misunderstanding from my side. > > > I don't allow windows machines in the house. :-) > > > > You sure?! What's running on your cell phone?! ;-) > Well, I'm pretty sure that like a substantial fraction of the world's > cellphones it has an ARM running EPOC in there. Are there _any_ > cellphones running windows? I don't think I 've heard of any. If there are, I don't think they'd tell you... Andreas

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newbie questions
by Michael Ackerman 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

Hi. I'm a beginner at Smalltalk, using Squeak and Winston's book on a Mac. Some questions: 1. If I can file-out using a pop-up menu, why can't I file-in the same way? How do I file-in? 2. If I can ask an object whether it's an integer by isInteger, why can't I ask it whether it's a string by isString? How do ask whether something's a string? 3. How do arrange arrange that the various welcoming windows don't show when I open Squeak? 4. How do I enlarge the original rectangle in which Squeak happens? If I use "full screen", I lose the Mac's menu bar. Thanks for your help. Michael

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Re: newbie questions
by Bob Arning 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

On Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:34:31 -0800 Michael Ackerman <ack(a)simplyweb.net> wrote: >3. How do arrange arrange that the various welcoming windows don't show >when I open Squeak? Arrange/close the windows (and preferences, desktop color, etc.) to suit your taste. Then save the image. The next time you start squeak, you'll be right back where you want to be. Cheers, Bob

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Programming facilities (was: RE: How Do You Do Business Apps? (Morphic Design Philosophy))
by Raab, Andreas 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

Paul and all, > For example, just a couple hours ago ago, I started FreeCell, clicked > "submorphs", pulled a card off the table and dropped it. [Lots and lots of stuff deleted] > The moral is stay away from the ALT and CTRL keys I guess? No. The moral is to learn your system better. The public release is not specifically designed to be a 'real' application (as you put it). But have you ever noticed that there is an option to turn off all the programmer facilities?! Just execute 'Preferences disableProgrammerFacilities' and nothing of the things you've mentioned will happen. And there are different levels of this kind of control. If you enable the #noviceMode in the preferences you won't see several of the programming related stuff anymore (Scott could tell you exactly what's disabled by this). > My point is, if you create a beautiful system to do a task, you don't > want the users (including yourself) unintentionally modifying that > system. Which is exactly what #disableProgrammerFacilities does. > You may also intentionally want to make it difficult > from users to change some things (the cards in the game), > while leaving it easy to change others (the location of > the cards within the table). Which is exactly what #noviceMode attempts. Note that it's not our fault if the designers of the applications you have mentioned don't make use of them. You may want to blame them and not Morphic in general. Andreas

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Re: Black holes in browser.
by Stefan Matthias Aust 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

At 15:34 26.02.00 -0300, you wrote: >Hi Joe. >You've sent this message some days ago. >I set the preferences as you said but the scrollbars remained on the >left-hand. >I opened a new browser and again... >I guess it's not implemented yet. Note. This only relates to Morphic, not to MVC: In 2.8a (and AFAIK also in 2.7) scrollbars on the righthand side are implemented and are working. You cannot combine that flapping scrollbar behavior and righthand scrollbars but you have to also check inboard scrollbars in the preferences dialog. >How you put the scrollbars on the right-hand? In Morphic, choose "help..." from the World menu, choose "preferences..." and [in 2.8a] search for "scrollbarsOnRight" in the "scrolling" page of the preferences dialog. In 2.7, the dialog is a long list and the setting might have a slightly different name. >>I have opened a new system browser.. >>I have preferences set so that the scrollbars are on the righthand >>side of the listing panes. >>I move the second scrollbar to the left of 'class' in the >>'instance/?/class' switch pane so all of the buttons do not show >>completely. That is, the 'class' button' may now only show 'cla'. >>Now, if I move the scrollbar to the right again, past the minumum size >>of the switch pane, >>it leaves a black square. This also happens with scrollbars on the lefthand side. As you said, it's a problem of the alignment morph that contains the buttons. Once it reaches its minimal size, it doesn't want to resize anymore. bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust // Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf.

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Re: Polling
by Charles-A. Rovira 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

There is another reason to avoid using polling. It has very little to do with optimality but having to do with design. Polling assumes a centralized implementation and one CPU controlling everything. If you try to distribute functionality across servers (even if they're only serving up very simple data streams,) you may not be able to poll the system at all. Event based designs enable you to design and implement asynchronously distributed systems. Something which is impossible with polled designs. Polling forces you to either drop an extremely useful paradigm and/or to contort an implementation into a less that reliable structure. (and Murphy's law applies: "Everything that can go wrong will!") At some point, some time, something will get dropped which will collapse the system onto itself like Schroedinger's Cat Box. Would you like to try to implement a real-time transaction processing system on a middling sized Beowolf cluster (~128 CPUs) in Squeak! and have to rely on polling to control it? I thought not. Squeak! runs on Linux. (I must confess I don't know how Squeak even handles some of the more interesting esoterica of X-Window.) Linux extends nicely into SMP clusters. Right now, we couldn't do anything on one, not because of the underlying system capabilities, nor with the capabilities of object-oriented designs (ideal for it!) but because of reliance on polling to control functionality. "demiourgos(a)smalltalk.org" wrote: > On Fri, 25 February 2000, "Lex Spoon" wrote: > > > > > Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout(a)kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote: > > > agree(a)carltonfields.com wrote: > > > > I'd be obliged if someone would explain why polling is a fatal flaw? > > > > > > * Polling uses up CPU cycles needlessly. > > [snip] > > > In theory, these are all correct. But in the specific case of Squeak > > polling for mouse events, they actually don't cause problems > > [snip] > > > That said, there *are* some weaknesses due to polling--people aren't > > going on about a *complete* nothing. The weaknesses are: > > > > 1. Sometimes a mouse click gets lost. > > > > 2. Mouse clicks don't always happen in the correct place, if you are > > moving the mouse quickly. > > > > AND, quite importantly, I think, with polling, one doesn't have to deal with > asynchronous events crashing on top of each other. These are, in most > systems, resolved in the hardware. Ironically, it uses a kind of polling, > although at a _very_ fast rate to discriminate. It is possible to miss > interrupts, even if hardware is being used, if they come too quickly on > top of one another. > > Indeed, for many years, aerospace software, pioneered by Boeing, was > always designed to use polling instead of interrupts for its functions. > There was a top-level cycle defined whose maximum length was determined > by response requirements. The OS -- fairly custom for these boxes -- > visited each of the major functions in turn. During development and > testing, each of the functions was allocated a maximum amount of > time it could use, depending on the amount of work it had to do and > upon its criticality. If there wasn't enough time in one pass, then it > was the responsibility of the function to put off doing things. During > debugging, the actual elapsed time for each function was recorded off > in OS memory some place, and the OS kept track of whether it was > doing the cycle in the time planned. It would alert if it was exceeding > the time, even stopping execution. That would allow users to examine > which of the functions was guilty. > > There's a simplicity here. > > -jtg > > [snip] > > __________________________________________________ > Jan Theodore Galkowski algebraist.com/ > www.whysmalltalk.com/ www.smalltalk.org/ > demiourgos(a)smalltalk.org marssociety.org/ > ************************************************** > PGP Key Fingerprint: 2757 F86D AA51 677D 38D7 > 964B 9A8D 7852 A494 3790 > ************************************************** > Get my Public Key from my home page at: > http://algebraist.com/ > ************************************************** > > ______________________________________________ > > Get free e-mail at http://www.britannica.com

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A peek outside of Squeak.
by Francois Le Coguiec 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

Hello, For those of you who sometimes need to do things outside of the Squeak VM, have tried Python... I just wanted to mention Ruby: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/library/ruby.html (I found it to be as close to Smalltalk as you can get) -Francois- ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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Re: How Do You Do Business Apps?
by demiourgos＠smalltalk.org 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

On Sat, 26 February 2000, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote: > > At 06:48 25.02.00 -0500, you wrote: > >>For business applications, I'd recommend to stay with Dolphin ST. Its > >>application framework (called MVP - Model View Presenter) is IMHO one of > >>the best things invented for Smalltalk. Squeak has nothing comparable > (yet). > > > >This is certainly true. OTOH, it will be just as difficult to evolve > >a Dolphin application to run on a Macintosh, Unix, or on any of the > >other myriad formats on which Squeak is supported. > > Andrew, I think you missundestood my point. I was refering just to > Dolphin's MVP pattern here. I think, the original poster didn't say > anything about different platforms but mentioned only Dolphin which, that > is true, only run on Windows. > > I'd say that porting MVP to Squeak is much easier than trying to port > Dolphin to any other platform as this is highly connected to the Windows > API using its foreign function interface instead of abstracting > functionality in primitives (as for example VisualWorks did). [snip] So, why not do Morphic in Dolphin, too? --jtg __________________________________________________ Jan Theodore Galkowski algebraist.com/ www.whysmalltalk.com/ www.smalltalk.org/ demiourgos(a)smalltalk.org marssociety.org/ ************************************************** PGP Key Fingerprint: 2757 F86D AA51 677D 38D7 964B 9A8D 7852 A494 3790 ************************************************** Get my Public Key from my home page at: http://algebraist.com/ ************************************************** ______________________________________________ Get free e-mail at http://www.britannica.com

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