On Thu, 02 May 2002 01:01:46 -0400, Doug Way wrote:
>* Command Completion Dependent on Preceding Expression
>   It would be really cool to have command completion (alt-q) work in 
>workspaces/inspectors, such that the preceding expression is parsed and 
>evaluated first so that the outputted "type" of the expression is known, 
>which can then restrict the messages listed to the ones that object 
>understands.  On second thought, this may not be feasible, since you 
>probably don't want to evaluate expressions which have side effects, or 
>take a long time to execute, ah well.

Still, inside an inspector or explorer (where mostly we just do self
sends) it would be great to have command completion which is
restricted to the set of selectors understood by 'self'.

Of course in the explorer 'self' refers to the currently selected
item, which (aha - lightbulb goes on!) could be very useful indeed.

Imagine an explorer open on a morph. Suppose we want to change its
transparency. We could type something like...

self color: (self color a

...then select 'color' in the explorer's upper pane so that we can now
get command completion just on the protocol of Color. On the third
attempt, we get the right selector...

self color: (self color alpha: 

... where we then fill in the argument, and return the upper pane
selection to the morph, before we do-it.

Well, its a tiny example, just of the top of my head really, but I
could see it being useful at times.

Regards,
Nick Brown