Several beginner questions

Raab, Andreas Andreas.Raab at disney.com
Thu Nov 25 00:30:56 UTC 1999


Mike,

> 1. I'm learning Smalltalk (since yesterday) using Squeak and 

Welcome! Hope you'll enjoy it. I hope I can answer some of your questions:

> I notice that
> there is some VRML related stuff in the library.  Where can I find
> documentation for those VRML objects, especially some example 
> code showing how to use them?

The VRML stuff that's in Squeak right now is actually intended to be a plain
VRML importer for Wonderland (the Alice system written in Squeak by Jeff
Pierce, see www.alice.org). It is not intended for some sort of 'standalone'
use (at least for the time being). The 'official' way to use it is to open a
file list, select the .wrl file to import and then to choose 'open in
Wonderland' from the file menu. Note that the VRML support is currently far
from being complete and also supports exclusively VRML97.

> 4. How do I execute an external program and get stdout output from that
> program back into Squeak?  (I would like to turn a bunch of data from an
> external program into VRML and/or a 3D display.)

There is currently no builtin support for running an external application
and pipe the results back to Squeak (though it would be simple to write
some). For experimenting you should probably try running your application
manually, pipe the result into a file and go on from there.

> 5. Is there documentation for the 3d library?

Short answer: No. I'm way to busy doing other exciting things and not a very
good writer as well (and English is not my native language). More than
enough reasons for me ... ;-)

> 6. Is it possible to produce a standalone deliverable application with all
> unnecessary stuff removed, using Squeak?  (not a major issue, I'm just
> curious).

It is possible though a little complicated. One ongoing project is to build
Squeak executables containing all the application code (e.g., the image) but
it's not finished yet.

> 7. If you customise your working environment, is that lost when you load
the
> latest set of updates to Squeak from the internet?

Generally not (or at least it shouldn't).

  Andreas





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