A stupid newbie question

Patrick Castle lemeia at bigpond.com
Mon Oct 8 12:37:04 UTC 2001


Thanks Phil. And thanks everyone for your assistance.

For no reason I can imagine, I didn't think to look in the String class even
though I new I was dealing with a String object.

All of the answers were helpful and I even understood all of them which
impressed me. However, it is true that I'm easily impressed.

I think I should try and post as many newbie questions as possible because
reading pages of digest I realised my topic was the only one I could follow.
I think I am an infant Smalltalker.

There is something I don't understand however.

If it is true that you can't deploy your projects as .exe files I'm not sure
I understand what the point is of working so hard to evolve a development
like Squeak. I'm sorry if that sounds like the dumbest question anyone could
possibly ask, but in my mind, development environments that can't deploy
projects as individually executable files are usually reserved for demos or
those learner CDs on books for Visual Basic or something like that aren't
they??

I'm notorious for missing the point but would I really have to distribute
Squeak in its entirety with any software I create to see it running on
another machine? Isn't that a really inefficient use of resources?

There's obviously so much more to this than I'm seeing so could someone set
the record straight for me?

Regards
Patrick

---

Patrick,
  You are getting a lot of help on this but I would like to add my two cents
worth.  The result of
aPoint := FillInTheBlank
        request: 'Next move?'
        initialAnswer: '1 at 1'.

is not a point.  The temporary variable, aPoint, is a string.  Remember that
the
object paridigm is a message is sent to an object and the result (what is
returned) is always.  So, if at this juncture aPoint is a String what
options in
the standard image are available to convert a string to a point.  This is
not
obvious but the simplest and most portable solution is:
aPoint := Point readFrom: (aPoint readStream).

The parathesis are unnecessary but added to emphasize the conversion from
aString to aStream.  Now aPoint will be an instance of Point.  Putting it
altogether you get:
aPoint := Point readFrom: (FillInTheBlank
                                            request: 'Next move?'
                                            initialAnswer: '1 at 1' )
readStream.
Phil






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