[Newbies] remembering variables

[peter h meadows]

Ah. Well, more often than not the variables in my code stay as one 'type' 
of thing. And I thought that generally they would otherwise things would 
get really confusing!?

Sometimes when I try to understand how a program is working I get lost in 
the debugger. What I'd like is a kind of overview of what's going on. 
Something I can browse and focus in on the parts that seem interesting. In 
theory I can do this with the system browser but it doesn't tell me how 
everything fits together. I want to see an overview of how all the parts 
fit together.. Who uses what.. Which bits are connected.. The order in 
which things are done, etc.

Can I get the debugger to show a tree of message sends, that I can browse? 
Something like that?

Any ideas? thx.



>>>>>> "peter" == peter h meadows <phm at sdf.lonestar.org> writes:
>
> peter> Oh. I'm still very new to smalltalk. It seemed like it would help me to
> peter> understand what's going on. I wanted it to remember everything. E.g if
> peter> the thing is an array it will tell me what has been stored in it. Also,
> peter> wouldn't it help with code completion? If it knows what type of object
> peter> it was in the past it can guess which messages I want to send to
> peter> it. That would be useful.
>
> But the problem is that a given type in the past is not any indication of
> a type in the future.
>
> You're not "thinking smalltalk" yet.  Stop worrying about types. :)
>
> Oh, and they aren't types.  They're instances of classes.
>
> If you want to see what's going on, learn to single step in the debugger.
> It's quite informative.
>