--On Tuesday, April 24, 2001 8:08 AM -0700 GXran Hultgren 
<gohu at rocketmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> --- Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
>> Hi
>>
> [SNIP]
>> I would really like that everybody seeing some small problems just record
>> them. I started to record the ones I fall upon in the Squeak World Tour
>> wiki (note that such a changes could be made into the current versions
>> too).
>
> I have felt the same way lots of times.
>
> A different approach (instead of using Swiki) to this problem would be to
> be able to "annotate" the code - or do we have this functionality in some
> way already?

Funny how this idea has cropped up a lot lately. I just had a little chat 
along these lines yesterday:

	http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/2001/04/hyper-collaboration-chat.txt


 > Like adding comments to methods etc. but with the little distinction that
> they are not normally shown except for some small marker saying that
> there is such comments to be seen if one were to turn on a special
> annotation switch.

And why just one? Why not arbitrarily many "layers" that could be toggled 
at will (with the degerate situation of having "browse as newbie" and 
"browse as expert").

> And perhaps the markers themselves could be turned off
> too - for those that despise this proposal. :-)

I've been exploring RDF based annotation schemes, and have put some thought 
into how to apply this to a Smalltalk system. But it's still kinda vague :)

There are similar pieces already in (sketchy) place in the system.

One of the simplest is to use #flag:. E.g., self flag: #refactor. This 
hooks you into the various extent browsing tools.

[snip]
> Then when looking at the code you can - if you want - access all those
> thoughts by others!
>
> Well, I do not know - it sounded smart when I wrote it... :-)

Sounds smart now :) Check out the Scan and Gossip stuff on the Swiki...I 
tend to think a similar design for generic metadata (including annotations) 
could work well.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.