"Richard L. Peskin" <rlpcon at vermontel.net> wrote:

>> Right now, neither external processes or Unix pipes are directly
>> supported in Squeak.  It's also unlikely that such platform-specific
>> features will ever end up in the core system.  However, it would still
>> be nice to have, as an add-on.

At the risk of being branded a heretic, I'd like to point out that Java
has a reasonably portable abstraction for external execution in the
Runtime and Process classes.  The *commands* needed to invoke a given
process are idiosyncratic to a platform, but they're modelled as
Strings; the details of exec and i/o streams to a process are
implemented inside Runtime and Process.  You could easily do something
similar in Squeak, and even provide platform-dependent Strings for
common process invocations.
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Engineering is never having to say you're finished.
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Bruce Cohen,                               |  email: cohenb at gemstone.com
GemStone Systems, Inc.                     |  phone: (503)533-3602
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