Loading a new image file into an already running session?

Lloyd Zusman ljz at asfast.com
Sat Nov 16 23:43:31 UTC 2002


Michael Rueger <m.rueger at acm.org> writes:

> Lloyd Zusman wrote:
>
>> I've been using versions 3.2-5 and 3.2-6devel, and I'm trying to load a
>> new image file into an already running Squeak session.  However, I
>> don't know how to do this.
>
> Smalltalk is probably the only system in the world that works this way,
> but it's important to understand that the image file *is* the
> system. It's actually a snapshot of a living object world that
> hibernates for a while on the disk.
> And practically all images in use today can probably be traced back to
> some first image that got created in the 70-ies.
> So the object "nil" in your image is really, really old. Well, at least
> to Californian standards ;-)
>
> Michael

OK.  I get it now: to load a new image file into a running Smalltalk
instance would be like using some facility of the universe (assuming
that the "universe" is "Everything That Exists") to replace itself with
another hypothetically existing "Everything That Exists".  I guess that
conceptually, this is in violation of Gödel's Theorem, or something
similar :)

So, I no longer want to try to do this.

Of course, this now begs the following question:  what, then, is the
purpose of the "readImageFromFile: HeapSize: StartingAt:" method of
Interpreter?

Or is this just some sort of relic from Smalltalk's prehistoric past in
paleolithic California?

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz at asfast.com



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