Dan Ingalls wrote:
PS it's also related to the problem of what to do about error dialogs in a headless system (a headless system is just one in which you have run the discardGraphics method ;-).
Many of those dialogs (like for missing files on FileStream>>readOnlyFileNamed:) shouldn't be there in the first place.
They should just raise exceptions. If the lower level classes raised exceptions, and the GUI was responsible for interacting with the user, it would be easier.
So menu choices or interactions with the browser would be protected by exception handling and could pop up dialogs, while the real functionality would raise exceptions while necessary.
One of the big problems with making a headless image _and_ discarding the graphics is all the calls to raise dialogs and popup menus.