Thanks very much for your suggestions and advice! I'm mainly just having  
some fun figuring out how things work at the moment. One of the things
I enjoy about Squeak is being able to see the whole system all the way
from the high level abstractions down to the bits and bytes. I'll try
not to let my more ill-conceived experiments loose on the world ;)

Dave
 
On Mon, Nov 01, 1999 at 12:07:53PM -0800, John.Maloney at disney.com wrote:
> Dave:
> 
> Re:
> >I'm trying to map a data structure (struct SQFile) in the VM to its
> >corresponding set of objects. The data structure is available as a
> >ByteArray on the Smalltalk side, and I was looking for a quick and
> >dirty way to convert to ByteArray into its corresponding Integers and
> >so forth. This would allow a convenient way to look at the SQFile data
> >structure with normal Smalltalk inspectors.
> 
> This is actually NOT a recommended, for several reasons. First,
> these objects are meant to just be handles to an opaque data
> abstraction; if you started to modify the bits you could either
> break the abstraction, crash the VM, or become dependent on an
> implementation detail that could change without warning in some
> future release. Second, the representation is entirely platform
> dependent. If you want your code to run everywhere, you'd have to
> have variations for each platform, and you'd need to detect which
> platform you were running on. That's just what the Squeak VM's
> abstraction of the underlying OS facilities is supposed to save
> you from having to do.
> 
> Re:
> >Further background: It seems to me that there should be no real conceptual
> >difference between an IO channel to a file, and an IO channel to a socket,
> >or to any other external IO channel which can be opened, closed, read,
> >or written to. Presumably these should all look like streams, and presumably
> >we would want socket streams, file streams, and any other streams on
> >external IO channels to behave in similar ways. The specifics of making
> >connections to various types of external IO channels probably merit their
> >own classes, which would know about things like SQFile and SQSocket data
> >structures if needed. I wrote some classes to do this for files and sockets,
> >and it all seems to work very nicely, but I still need a machine independent
> >way to convert the file and socket data structures into Smalltalk objects,
> >hence the question about converting integers back and forth between
> >ByteArrays and Integers.
> 
> It seems to me that you would accomplish your goals most easily
> simply by building wrapper object that holds either a FileStream and
> Socket object. That is, you could build a class "UniversalStream"
> that provides buffered stream I/O to either a file or a socket.
> Instances of UniversalStream would have a private instance variable that
> was a Squeak FileStream or Socket object. There would be no reason for
> them to directly manipulate the data structures of the underlying VM
> implementation of these objects (SQFile and SQSocket).
> 
> 	-- John
> 
>