Squeak-dev June 2002

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173 participants
382 discussions

[BC][VI4] Forked Squeak version
by Anthony Hannan 12 Jul '02

12 Jul '02

Hello all, There have been some questions about the status of the block closure version and when it will get into the main release. The short answer is its not ready for the main release yet. There are still more enhancements I want to add that will change the bytecodes, and thus image format. Plus other VI4 enhancements need to be added. So the best strategy for now is to treat BC as a fork and evolve it, then when we think it is stable we will make it the main release. Note, the BC fork will be able to stay current with the latest updates, since it can read from the update stream just like the main image. Here is what I suggest: First, let's make BC and VI4 the same thing. Before, BC was a component of VI4, but now I will include other VI4 enhancements when building the BC version, and will drop the use of the term "BC" and now call it "VI4". Second, let's make the previous BC swiki page the main VI4 page. http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2119 will now contain all the changesets needed to make the VI4 version from the main version and, as a convenience, the pre-built VI4 version itself. Updates specific to VI4 will also be maintained on this page ready to be downloaded and filed-in to the VI4 image. Contributers are free to add changesets/updates to this page. That's it. We now have two flavors of Squeak, the main one and the VI4 one. Go to http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/VI4 to check out VI4. Please feel free to add other changesets that you think should be included in VI4. Just make sure they work with the rest of VI4 (the BC stuff). Much of the Interpreter related to the call stack and bytecodes has changed, and some of its instance variables have changed with it, but you should be able to figure it out. The rest of the Interpreter/ObjectMemory has not changed. Cheers, Anthony

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RE: {bad habits] Squeak for Windows - Ctrl instead of Alt key
by G.J.Tielemans＠dinkel.utwente.nl 11 Jul '02

11 Jul '02

<snip> I think this might be going too far... the default key bindings should probably be the same for Squeak on all platforms, otherwise there'd be confusion when reading documentation, etc. You should consciously change a setting to get different bindings. (An end-user runtime is a different story... there it might make sense to detect the platform and set the key bindings appropriately.) - Doug Way dway(a)riskmetrics.com Ger: 1. which documentation 2. Wasn't the design of the red yellow and blue buttons not just the solution for platform (mouse) independency?

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Re: Jython vs Squeak for teaching multimedia
by Richard A. O'Keefe 10 Jul '02

10 Jul '02

Roger Whitney <whitney(a)cs.sdsu.edu> wrote: Many places in USA, including where I teach, teach Java without classes. ... Try to do the following simple beginner assignment in Java: Prompt the user for two numbers and print out their sum. OK. import java.lang.*; import java.io.*; public class MyFirstProgram { public static void main(String argument[]) { try { Reader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); StreamTokenizer t = new StreamTokenizer(r); System.out.print("Enter two numbers: "); if (t.nextToken() != StreamTokenizer.TT_NUMBER) throw new IOException(); double first_number = t.nval; if (t.nextToken() != StreamTokenizer.TT_NUMBER) throw new IOException(); double second_number = t.nval; System.out.println(first_number + second_number); } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("Oops!"); } } } You will discover that using the command line you have to read & parse the input character by character and manually convert the input to a number. This claim at least is totally false. (Amongst other things, Double.valueOf("<some number>") can be used for the conversion.) For my purposes, at any rate, StreamTokenizer is *the* answer to elementary text input in Java. It isn't ideal, but it is _there_. You also have to deal with exceptions, streams, static etc. Java input is really too complex for raw beginners. This of course I completely agree with. This is why several Java CS1 books come with their own simple I/O package. None of this explains why it is better to avoid classes. Don't students _wonder_ what Reader is (it's a class) and what kind of thing they find string->number conversion in (they're classes)? Or are you vehemently agreeing that "Java without classes" is like joining the group on the bandwagon so you can ride underneath? Now try the same problem in Squeak. How many weeks (months) earlier could you assign the problem in a Squeak class than in a Java class? Depends on how much luck you have getting Squeak to run headless, I suppose. The thing _I_ find objectionable about this example is that on a 250MHz UltraSparc I it takes fully three seconds from the time I type RETURN at the end of "java MyFirstProgram" to the time that the prompt appears. (Any Lisp programmers who remember how Lisp was reviled as too big and too slow? Feh!)

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Re: Image growth
by goran.hultgren＠bluefish.se 10 Jul '02

10 Jul '02

Hi! se99011(a)fhs-hagenberg.ac.at wrote: > Hi there, > > I work on a 3.0 image with all fixes. I do some "trivial" development work (a banking system), working on about a dozen classes, using the Whisker browser, a workspace and a selector browser. > > After a week of work or so my image has grown in size _considerably_. Starting from the original 10 MB I'm now at 23 MB. Am I doing something wrong? I tried to garbageCollect a few times, but this only frees a few KB. Hmmm, sounds strange. Are you playing around with globals? Have you tried looking at: MyClass allInstances size ...for your classes? Perhaps you have many more instances hanging around than you know. Oh, yes - try copying all your text in the workspace over to a new fresh workspace and close the old one. Workspaces are "friendly" in that you don't need to declare local variables, it creates it's own bindings instead so it may be holding onto old instances too. If you find more instances thatn you like this is a good one too: PointerFinder on: myLittleInstance ...to find why an instance is hanging around (it's chain of owners up to the globals in Smalltalk) regards, Göran

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Image growth
by se99011＠fhs-hagenberg.ac.at 10 Jul '02

10 Jul '02

Hi there, I work on a 3.0 image with all fixes. I do some "trivial" development work (a banking system), working on about a dozen classes, using the Whisker browser, a workspace and a selector browser. After a week of work or so my image has grown in size _considerably_. Starting from the original 10 MB I'm now at 23 MB. Am I doing something wrong? I tried to garbageCollect a few times, but this only frees a few KB. ? Christian Eitner cE: Sub-Omnipotent/SoftwareEngineer

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Changes acceptance procedures
by Peter Schuller 04 Jul '02

04 Jul '02

Hello, what's the current procedures/policies for accepting changes into Squeak? Back in January of 2001 I submitted an enhancement of the ConnectionQueue class (http://swiki.gsug.org:8080/sqfixes/1285.html). I never received any response. I'm bringing this up because looking at the list of fixes at: http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/sqfixes/old/23Aug01/sqfixes4.html I get the impression that most fixes go unnoticed/uncommented and presumably uncommitted to the official Squeak. I suppose my enhancement may have contained a bug / been considered badly written; but I would at least have expected to receive some sort of response. Especially since the enhancement addressed the need for blocking accepts - a very basic feature in most development environments. Yet the Squeak Socket/ConnectionQueue stuff only supports a polling approach. In other words, I would have expected the functionality to be desired. My question is - did my enhancement slip through the cracks, or are the maintainers simply too busy to handle all the changes that come in? Is this a general problem? If the latter - perhaps a reorganization is needed. There is much talk about Squeak being Open Source and how easy it is to contribute to the project; but if changes go ignored, the submitter is less likely to continue submitting enhancements. I get the distinct impression that this is a general problem. Surfing the Wiki one can find various nice things (such as better-looking themes, a new and improved system browser, etc) - but they are not in the official Squeak release even though they are seemingly things many people would want - and particularly things that would help Squeak achieve success among newcomers. Comments? Flames? :) -- / Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <peter.schuller(a)infidyne.com>' Key retrival: Send an E-Mail to getpgpkey(a)scode.org E-Mail: peter.schuller(a)infidyne.com Web: http://www.scode.org

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A new user question
by salemi 04 Jul '02

04 Jul '02

Hello, I just downloaded the Squeak software. My goal is to learn to create projects similar to driving the racing car example in the scripts section of Squeak and then teach high school students to create their own projects. I would appreciate if you let me know where to start. Do you think the required skills for writing scripts are beyond the high school students abilities. Thanks, Behnam.

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3.2 gamma handoff
by Dan Ingalls 03 Jul '02

03 Jul '02

Folks - [I'm about to leave town] I have incorporated the last updates I knew of (incl a couple JMM suggested that were required to compile a new VM on some platforms), have brought in an old copy of readme.txt, and have written a short word of caution to folks who should be at SqueakAlpha, not in Squeak. I consider this final in code but not in appearance (please don't be shocked by the mess on screen). It needs... 1. The readme to be updated (flaps and UI prefs at least) and combined with the Getting Started text 2. A proper statement about rights and openness from Andrew, to go in the welcome window (probably at the end) 3. Ted to fix the SqC image whose URL appears in the welcome window, and it needs a good URL for Flash demo (suggestions??). I have placed the latest image on UIUC as Squeak3.2gamma3.zip (I used Squeak to zip it, thanks for the encouragement). I have spoken with Scott Wallace who says he is willing to do the final laying on of hands to finish this up. If you have easily-implemented suggestions about the appearance of, or text to go in, the first-screen windows, please relay them promptly to Scott. I will continue to be in touch be e-mail, though unable to do much of substance from here on. Scott knows this stuff well, and will probably do a better job that I at putting this baby in truly final form. Good luck, y'all... - Dan

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Idea to get money in Squeak community
by Stephane Ducasse 02 Jul '02

02 Jul '02

Hi Right now even if we want to give money to Squeak we cannot. There is no place where I can support Squeak by paying a kind of shareware fee or even to get a CD with all the Squeak material. In the school of my wife they are paying around 1000 $ for office and they don't use it so I do not see why they would not like to get a good cd with the major release on it. This is the same here at the University we could support Squeak but at least there should be a way to give money. I hope that ESUG will not lose money this year and that we will be able to give the purcentage we promised to Squeak. But at the minimum we need to be able to do that. I'm fed up to see that people are afraid to make money with Squeak because this could be a problem for SqueakC. Alan said it was not. So are the German Squeakers in the mood to get money? I can send you the cd with all the material I collected. Tansel what are your plans? Stef Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse(a)iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/ "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

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Lowcost Handheld ARM system for Squeak (was RE: Dynapad R0.1 Rele ased)
by Swan, Dean 02 Jul '02

02 Jul '02

Actually, It's 16.78 MHz ARM 7, but the RAM limitation is the real problem. If you want a *very* inexpensive 133 MHz ARM9 based machine with a 320x240x16bit 3.5 inch color display, 8 megabytes of SDRAM, and an SMC memory card port, and USB port, I'd suggest the GP32. It's still only available in Korea, but you can also buy it mail order from Lik-Sang in Hong Kong for $159 US + shipping. There are a lot of development support tools available on the net. Squeak could be ported to the Gameboy Advance, and I've looked at it a bit, but to be at all useable, it would really need a serious overhaul of morphic to take advantage of the display hardware. I think just using a software bitblit would give a mighty unpleasant user experience. You can get 32 megabyte flash cartridges with 256K bytes SRAM pretty cheap, but that along with the 256K + 32K bytes internal SRAM plus 96K bytes display memory would still make a pretty tight environment for any recent version of Squeak. The GP32 costs about twice as much as the Gameboy Advance, but is only slightly larger and much more capable hardware, and the screen is about the same size as the iPaq screen. -Dean See: http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/product_info.php?category=7&products_id=812& http://www.gp32world.de/ http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0018703/gp32world/gp32/gp32.html -----Original Message----- From: Tim Rowledge [mailto:tim@sumeru.stanford.edu] Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 9:25 PM To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: Dynapad R0.1 Released Jerome Chan <eviltofu(a)mac.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written: > Has anyone tried porting Squeak to the Game Boy Advance? 40MHz ARM7 & less than a meg of ram doesn't add up to great performance for Squeak. tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim(a)sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Useful random insult:- A gross ignoramus -- 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.

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