Squeak-dev September 2001

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168 participants
408 discussions

Re: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested
by Fleeberz＠aol.com 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

In a message dated 2001-09-27 1:52:27 AM, cg(a)cdegroot.com writes: -><Fleeberz(a)aol.com> said: ->Oh, and complaining that the English-only interface is a hindrance, ->well, Computerchannel.de is German-only, but I was still able to ->figure out what they were talking about. >What a dumb remark. They're talking about kids here, and I can assure >you that the average kid's English outside the US or UK is by far not >enough to use Squeak. If Squeak aims to be something for kids, it needs >to be internationalized. What an absolute moron I was for failing to consider the considerable focus of the Squeak community regarding the Children of the World. Obviously, I must have taken the "English-only" complaint out of context, thinking that the *reviewer*, rather than the *potential user* could have tried harder to make sense of the (currently) English-centric implementation. Speaking of dumbness, I guess you'll just have to take that up with the fool(s) who haven't internationalised Squeak yet - after all, why should they even suggest the possibility of children using the thing unless the menus can easily be set to display in Farsi or Erzya, never mind the absurdity of English-named classes, methods, and all that. We've supported Unicode for some time now, right? And what about the blind Gagauzian-speaking kids? Is the text-to-speech functionality unfairly biased against them? My point is that I, being a stupid English-speaking American, having no fluency whatsoever in any but my native language, had never before attempted to read "foreign" information on Squeak, because of the abundance of English material available which is so much more understandable to me. I falsely believed that Squeak was continuing to evolve, and wasn't expected to be everything to everyone all at once. The astute reviewer rightly criticized Squeak for failing to have evolved sufficiently for a global audience of adults, let alone children. Surely, had I an iota of a clue, I would have realized that the important thing to do regarding this matter would be to complain about an inadequate localization framework - too bad I missed that chance. Shame on you, Cees, for chastising me for my obvious ignorance. My respect for you has been betrayed; I would have expected you "Germanize" Squeak instead, if that's what it's begging for, and perhaps write some comprehensible on-line tutorials as well. If anyone needs tutorials that a 9- or 10-year-old could understand, it's me. I can't afford the ridiculous price of the Squeak (Smalltalk...) books, and from what I read on this list, that's the only way to ever figure it out. You and others can spend hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to fly around and chat with other OOP aficionados, I can't. That's what makes you better than me. I am happy for you. Keep on Squeakin' --Flee Never meddle in the affairs of idiots, it makes them soggy and hard to light.

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New idiom for conditional testing?
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

I was looking at a Lint report, and it found this method - RenameVariableChange>>= = aRenameVariableChange self class = aRenameVariableChange class ifFalse: [^false]. ^className = aRenameVariableChange changeClassName and: [isMeta = aRenameVariableChange isMeta and: [oldName = aRenameVariableChange oldName and: [newName = aRenameVariableChange newName]]] Lint was bothered by the use of a guard clause for the first check. Lint believes in #and:. I was bothered because it's ugly. I'd prefer something less cluttered. We have blocks, we can abstract it! How about this - ^{[self class = aRenameVariableChange class]. [className = aRenameVariableChange changeClassName]. [isMeta = aRenameVariableChange isMeta]. [oldName = aRenameVariableChange oldName]. [newName = aRenameVariableChange newName]} allTrue Note that the conditions should be tested in order and lazily - stops at the first false. The implementation is as follows - Collection>>allTrue ^self detect: [:e | e value not] ifNone: [nil]) isNil What do you think? Any other ideas on how to factor this sort of code? Daniel

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Re: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested
by Fleeberz＠aol.com 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

In a message dated 2001-09-30 1:14:18 PM, karl.ramberg(a)chello.se writes: Fleeberz(a)aol.com wrote: >> I haven't gotten the hang of Smalltalk AT ALL yet, ... >The way I learned was by finding a simple morphic demo or program, >change a few parameters, open the morph and see what had happened... >Do this over and over again until you know what to change to get >what you want. Then expand by cutting and pasting in code from other >places, testing and debugging a few thousen times you will suddenly >just know how to do it the next time. A few thousand times? Oh weary me. I know that is not as much of a joke as it sounds like (although I can appreciate some humor from it as well), and is really likely to be a low estimate for many people, er, me. ;^) >I allways browse with optinal buttons on and use the senders of and >implementors of all the time to see how stuff is used elsewere in >the image. Surely I've seen references to these things, but can't seem to recall where; looks like it's time to start looking. With luck, I'll trip over them early in the "search." Will be looking for preferences, and perhaps browser menu items such as "show implementors of..." and so on. See? It's easy! (?) Thanks, Karl. I'd ask Cees or Bijan about it, but considering how I've treated those wonderful people in the past, I'm better off having my tail between my legs than nothing at all. :-/ (C, B, I'm sorry. Me bad.) --Flee

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RE: Edited Volume in stores July 13
by Andy Stoffel 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Just wondering when this will be available :-).... > Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia > Edited by Mark Guzdial and Kimberly Rose > > Paperback - 544 pages 1st edition (July 15, 2001) > Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0130280917 > > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130280917/ref=sim_books/002-1882326- 3041605 Amazon says July 25th @$39 but doesn't have any while Borders notes it's existance but has no date other than "July 2001" and no price (Though I was able to pick up the other Squeak book "Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with Multimedia Applications" at my local Borders several weeks after it came out for less than it would have cost to get it shipped from Amazon (Which now wants $45 for that particular book & Borders seems to think is either hard to find or out of print... though I saw a copy 2 weeks ago at the same Borders I bought my copy at.... odd....)) So I'd like to get a copy before it goes out of print %-).... -Andy-

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Getting accents into Squeak
by John Hinsley 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

I've just noticed this (the localisation stuff may have some kind of bearing on it, but......). There I was trying to put a name with "ü" (that's u with a dieresis, I think) in my Rolodex. Of course, you can copy and paste into a workspace and it'll appear correctly, but you can't copy and paste into a Text or ShowEmptyText morph (maybe I should take a look at that -- I think it would be useful). But is there any way (and here I'm working in Linux -- I guess the old number pad method works in Windows) of typing it in directly, given a UK keyboard? (Here, locales or foreign keyboards are not really a viable option: I'd need some bizzare combination of Italian, German and Spanish. Cheers John -- Can't cope anymore? Desperate for help? Join the 12 step program for those who yearn to give up Microsoft: http://home.earthlink.net/~penguinrox/index.html

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[modules] Cutting the knot
by Dan Ingalls 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

-- Folks - I feel the need to cut what has become a Gordian knot. By the end of this week I intend to issue Henrik's module code as updates to Squeak 3.1alpha. While this may look selfish or irrational, I think it's the right thing to do, and at this point someone will likely be unhappy no matter what we do. Our top priorities for modules in Squeak are: Support modularity of active Squeak content distributed as projects on the Internet Support an ecology of interrelated enhancements to Squeak from throughout the community Keep it small and simple. This is a Squeak Central perspective. Others surely have other priorities. We feel that as soon as we achieve the first goal, Squeak will disappear. In other words, the significance of Squeak as a vehicle for easily-authored multimedia content will dwarf that of Squeak as a development environment, and all the activity of this mailing list will likely pale by comparison to work on active content. The ModSqueak work is an excellent system with a somewhat different set of priorities. It could be made to serve these ends, but I foresee constant conflict in trying to do so. I prefer to proceed directly toward these goals with Henrik's code, and to allow the ModSqueak facilities to remain one of the packages that can be easily loaded by anyone who wants its particular benefits. In adopting this approach we will take care that nothing in the resident module scheme interferes with loading and using ModSqueak as now. Presumably a great deal could actually be shared, once the dust settles a bit, and loading should, of course, become simpler. What is important is that ModSqueak can remain just what its authors intended it to be, and the the resident module system can be tweaked into a lean and effective architecture for community sharing and active media on the web. Those who have followed the full modules discussion will recognize that our first priority here is really more of a component architecture, and this is true. At the same time, we feel that the module kernel will serve well the needs of the Squeak community for collaboration and distribution of add-on packages, as well as producing reduced images for PDAs, servers and other applications. Yours on behalf of SqC (and wearing asbestos today ;-) - Dan

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Re: Skip Lists?!
by goran.hultgren＠bluefish.se 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

"Andreas Raab" <Andreas.Raab(a)gmx.de> wrote: > Folks, > > I noticed them coming into Squeak a while ago and always since I wanted to > ask this question: What the heck are they good for?! ;-) I don't see them Well, I was also implementing them for fun and there are some nice pdfs on the net somewhere (Google ought to find them for you) explaining them in detail - including a revised concurrent version (which the implementation in Squeak is not I assume). Note: there might be factual errors here - I am no expert: Basically it is a list with overlayed pointers that you can use to "skip ahead" in the list. These pointers are created using randomness and thus you end up with searchproperties etc much like a balanced binary tree - but you don't have to worry about balancing etc. and insertions/deletions and so forth are much easier implemented. It is a damn clever and rather "obvious" solution, but who would even think of using randomness in a datastructure? :-) As far as I can tell it is a very good alternative to balanced binary trees (much easier implementation being prime advantage I believe) - performance wise they are much the same. I read somewhere that database implementations still might prefer Btrees because of some property that make them more efficient when it comes to distribution on secondary memory - but I don't know the details on that. So... seems like a good structure to have in Squeak - even if nobody uses it yet! :-) regards, Göran > used anywhere and I've never heard of 'em before (yeah, well, my > introductory courses in algorithms and data structures were plenty of years > back ;-) but somebody found them important enough to write and include them. > Since I like data structures (in particular efficient ones) I'd like to hear > more about the places in which SkipLists could and should be used instead of > other approaches. Pointers to comparisons would be nice, examples in Squeak > even nicer ;-) > > > Cheers, > - Andreas

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[OT] aRts (KDE) and Squeak...one year later
by Kevin Fisher 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Hi folks: I think about a year ago I was experimenting with 'artsdsp' and Squeak. Arsdsp magically forwards all of Squeak's sound calls to a sound daemon. A year ago, it worked rather poorly with the nasty side-effect of driving CPU usage up to 100%. I've been playing with it with the latest artsd shipped with the latest KDE and everything seems a lot better. Even speech synth (which didn't work a year ago) is working over aRts. I haven't seen the 100% CPU problem happen either. So, for any aRts (or KDE, as I use aRts with Window Maker) users out there, you can just do 'artsdsp squeak SomeImage.image' and Squeak will magically work with aRts...I haven't had any problems so far. I wonder how difficult a VM plugin for aRts would be?

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Re: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested
by Fleeberz＠aol.com 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

In a message dated 2001-09-26 7:15:47 PM, gafisher(a)sprynet.com writes: >The implication that there was something bad in the interface >because it was intuitive after second or third attempt strikes >me as the comment of someone who doesn't want to take chances, >but taking chances is the foundation of most learning. As is often said, the only intuitive interface is the nipple; everything else is learned. I haven't gotten the hang of Smalltalk AT ALL yet, but that's not going to keep me from reading this list, getting all the goodies and updates and following links to more information. Someday, I'm sure I'll get the hang of it, and be grateful for "hanging in there." - Regardless, I know I'm not really such an idiot either, even though I strongly feel that Squeak is very powerful, easy to use (for the rest of you, obviously) and innovative. Oh, and complaining that the English-only interface is a hindrance, well, Computerchannel.de is German-only, but I was still able to figure out what they were talking about. Nice site ("optically" anyway ;) --Flee

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Re: [modules] Ginsu in 3.1
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 01 Oct '01

01 Oct '01

Hans-Martin Mosner <hm.mosner(a)cityweb.de> wrote: > Perhaps we need some kind of module and repository concept here :-) Have you looked at SCAN? it doesn't suck too bad... ;-) > BTW, I'm now working on producing a complete first modularization of the > 3.1 image, but this will take some more time... Running the module > builder again and again is somewhat time consuming. So if it's three times faster, you'll finish real soon? :-) I promise it's faster. I'm pretty sure it's correct, too... But if you have the tests loaded, I'd run them first. ;-) > Cheers, > Hans-Martin Daniel Vainsencher

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