Guys,

Thanks for your pointers. I downloaded the test collections and I'm
going to give them a try tonight.

> > Andrew Black and me are refactoring the ST collection hierarchy in 
> > Squeak using the Traits model.
> 
> Excellent.  Are you going to do streams next?  Do you need help?

We were actually thinking about doing streams next, but first we would
like to do some more work in the collection hierarchy. Both, the stream
and the collection hierarchy have in common that single inheritance is
simply not expressive enough to model these hierarchies in a optimal way
and factor out all the common features of the different classes. (BTW,
this dilemma is described in an OOPSLA paper of William Cook with the
title "Interfaces and Specifications for the Smalltalk-80 Collection
Classes" (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/491705.html)).

We believe that traits are a mechanism that allows one to model these
hierarchies the way they should be without inhibiting the
understandability of the resulting code and without making the
hierarchies fragile. It looks very promising!

Unfortunately, the current version of the Trait implementation in Squeak
needs a bit more work until it is ready for a first (beta) release.
However, I hope to be able to do that soon. I'm also working on a paper
describing the traits model, but also this is not quite done yet. 

I'll keep you informed,
Nathanael

BTW: I'll be in OOPSLA this year. So, if any of you guys are there, I
would be happy to chat and show you more...


> 
> > In order to validate the refactored
> > classes, we need to have some test cases. We tried to find 
> such tests 
> > on the web, but without success. Does anyone know whether there are 
> > tests for the ST collection classes available in Squeak or other ST 
> > dialects. Maybe as a part of the ANSI standardizaion 
> effort? If yes, 
> > please let me know. It could save me a lot of work...
> 
> The ANSI tests were on Richard Harmon's homepage, which seems 
> to be down. I don't know if anyone has any idea where else 
> they might be available in Squeak format.  However, they're 
> also in the GNU smalltalk distribution - download 
> ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/smalltalk> -2.0d.tar.gz and 
> look at tests/ANSI.st .
> 
> Cheers,
> Avi
> 
> 
>