Three cheers! :-)

Another reason that the "convenience" of smart inspect won't be missed
much is due to the ObjectExplorer, which makes it fairly painless to pop
down an extra level into a one-item collection.  (For those who want speed
of drilling down, anyway.)

Yet another benefit will be the removal of the extra "smart inspect"/ 
"basic inspect" menu items taking up space and adding confusion. (I
assume "basic inspect" was simply the normal non-smart inspect?)

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net


On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Scott Wallace wrote:

> I'm happy to announce the death of the much-criticized "smartInspect" feature.
> 
> The motivation behind "smartInspect" is illustrated by the following scenario:
> 
> You're in an inspector, and in its inspect-list you've selected an 
> item whose value is a one-element array.   You want to get your hands 
> on that lone element.
> 
> Classic Smalltalk inspector logic requires that you go through the 
> intermediate step of getting an inspector for the array object, and 
> only from that intermediate inspector can you then get the inspector 
> on the value you're really interested in.  Thus, you double the 
> number of windows involved and the number of menu "inspect" requests.
> 
> The "smartInspect" logic collapsed those steps, so that when, in an 
> inspector, you asked to inspect a one-element collection, you went 
> straight to an inspector on that single element, skipping the 
> intermediate step.
> 
> However, as Bert Freudenberg and Bob Arning and others have pointed 
> out more than once, the naive logic of #smartInspect could get in the 
> way -- and sometimes could be downright wrong -- when the collection 
> being looked at is, for example, a String consisting of one 
> character, or a Semaphore.
> 
> And others will argue, with undeniable merit and virtue, that they'd 
> prefer to have absolute consistency rather than put up with anything 
> that tries to streamline their workflow by being "smart".
>  
> So I now offer -- in two updates to 2.8a which should find their way 
> into the external update stream soon enough (#1786 "listDblClick" and 
> #1788 "inspectElement") -- the following remedies for this situation:
> 
> (1)  The "inspect" menu item in an inspector will now always trigger 
> a plain inspect, never a "smartInspect".  The #smartInspect selector 
> is everywhere removed.
> 
> (2)  When the selection in an inspect-list is a suitable kind of 
> Collection, a new item, "inspect element...", will now appear in the 
> inspect-list menu, which allows you to inspect any chosen element of 
> the collection without needing first to open an intermediate 
> inspector on the collection object itself.  The interaction here 
> strives to be accommodating:
>    [a]  If the selection has only one element, that lone element is inspected.
>    [b]  If the selection has a small number of elements, a simple pop-up of the
>            potential indices is presented, inviting you to choose
>            which element to inspect.
>    [c]  If the selection has many elements, you are prompted for the
>            index of the element you wish to inspect, which you must type in.
> 
> (3)  A quick double-click on an item in an inspect-list will now 
> launch an inspector on that item.  This is a feature long requested 
> by Chris Norton and others, and was one of the more beloved features 
> of old Digitalk Smalltalk/V.  The implementation here is based on 
> code sent around by Bob Arning a couple of months ago.  This new 
> feature reduces the pain involved in opening longer chains of 
> inspectors, because you won't need to fish for "inspect" items in 
> menus.
> 
> The first two changes apply equally to morphic and to mvc, but the 
> double-click-to-inspect feature is strictly morphic.
> 
>    -- Scott
> 
> 
> At 1:53 PM +0100 1/14/00, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> >On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> >
> > > when I inspected #(-) the element is a Character !!!!!!!
> > > I checked #(a) is not an array with the symbol #a but the character a
> >
> >It's not. Sadly enough, but you're not the first one biten by
> >smartInspect.
> >...
> >Yes, we definetly need to get rid of smartInspect - we need to be able to
> >trust inspectors.
> >
> >HTH,
> >
> >  -Bert-
> 
>