On Jul 3, 2007, at 10:18 AM, Francisco Diaz Trepat - gmail wrote:

Hi guys, this might be about the first or second time I write to the list. I hadn't being involve so much but I do read it frequently.

I was wondering if you knew, or if any-one at squeak dev had participated in the F-Script...

I saw a demo video at google the other day and was pretty impressed.

Has anybody seen it, heard of it, developed it?

I was looking for some comments/opinions.

Hi,

I've used F-Script. It's very nice. Doesn't have a lot to do with Squeak, though :D

It is very nice when I am writing Cocoa programs to use F-Script Anywhere to embed F-Script within my application, and then modify my program's objects live and in Smalltalk.

Cheers, Tim

On Jul 3, 2007, at 10:18 AM, Francisco Diaz Trepat - gmail wrote: ..

Has anybody seen it, heard of it, developed it?

F-Script is cool, and a great way to explore the Cocoa API. Because of it, I finally gained some respect for the Cocoa API as something similar in power as your run of the mill Smalltalk class library. I've used it to write some scripts for when I was using a Newton a lot still- I wrote a 5 line script in F-Script that took a PDF and outputted an HTML page with PNGs for each page of the PDF. No PDF readers for the Newton OS, and this was a pretty decent way to read some PDFs. Because of its great interactivity for playing with and discovering what Cocoa provides, it was the ideal environment to figure this out in. I then took the F-Script and brought it over to Squeak, where I was using the ObjC bridge to do the same calls, but also a little web interfacing with Comanche (go to page, put PDF url, do ObjC calls, return HTML linking to PNGs). It was pretty slick and took less time than compiling GhostScript on my machine at the time.

That said, I would like it more if you could actually develop with it. While I like the Cocoa API, you can't use F-Script to develop applications for Cocoa, completely. You can't create new subclasses, so it is confined to scripting. I don't know about F-Script's internals, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to flesh out into a usable, more complete Smalltalk-with-Cocoa-libs implementation for developing full apps without the need to write code in both F-Script and ObjC.

I don't quite understand the excitement some folks get over the @ operand for basically doing #collect:. I mean, it's cool, but I was able to implement it in Squeak in minutes. It's impressive for folks who have been stuck in a block-less language, I don't blame them for that!

Regards, Aaron