Faith of Correspondents?

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Tue Nov 9 04:59:20 UTC 1999


At 7:02 PM -0500 11/8/99, Craig Latta wrote:

>Hi Bijan--

Hi Craig, thanks for taking the time to answer my ungrounded worries ;)

>> There is a Squeak Central project for 1) doing the minimal to
>> fix the broken socket stuff and 2) larger refactorings. But you
>> know that :)
>
>	Yeah, the swiki says that, but it seems Squeak Central has backed off
>from (2).

I hope not. I know other folks are interested in generalize and streamlined
streams. I'd really like streams to be as natural to use as collections,
maybe naturaler ;)

>> I do have a concern, really two: 1) The streaming framework is
>> rather a radical refactoring and, if adopted, would eventually require
>> updating large chunks of the system, yes?
>
>	Only if one wanted to get rid of the old framework. I've done it once
>before already,

Got rid of the old framework and updated the rest of the system? Impressive!

> when I originally wrote the new one (1996, Squeak 1.13). It
>took three days and wasn't difficult.

Oh! This is good news, indeed.

>> And its rather different that the Blue Book classes yes?
>
>	Not radically. The differences are in implementation; the message
>interfaces are very similar, and compatible. Perhaps the biggest difference
>is that "write-only"-ness is not expressed in the class factoring (I posit
>>that it's not necessary).

That's good news, too.

>> So really good docs would be required, porting becomes harder,
>> etc.
>
>	I intend to write good documentation. I have some already for the
>networking-related streaming stuff. I don't think porting becomes
>significantly harder, having converted an entire system already. I have
>compatibility messages for the transition.

Hmm. I seem to keep repeating myself ;)

>> > > Can Correspondents easily be adapted to the official
>> > > exception framework?
>> >
>> > It would be straightforward, but also a significant amount of...
>> > tedious... work. Ah, restraint. :)
>>
>> But might be worth it anyway for portability to other Smalltalks?
>
[snip discussion of Squeak Central adoption policies--I've put it in a
separate post]
[snip my description of squeak as a "server os" :)]
>
>	My experience with the real-time Interval system leads me to believe
>this is very feasible. I intend to show this with netjam.org. It's up all
>the time, and I have full control over it. I plan to run many servers on
>>it, in a single Squeak object memory.

I'm glad you think so. I hope it happens and soonish!

Cheers,
Bijan.





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