On Monday, April 7, 2003, at 12:00  AM, Avi Bryant wrote:

>
> On Mon, 7 Apr 2003, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>
>> Hi avi
>>
>> I still strongly believe that having a declarative model would be
>> excellent.
>> Do you think we could built something on top of moticello?
>
> Monticello's model is geared very specifically towards versioning.  
> One of
> the results of this bias is that each code element is modelled largely
> independently.  A single Revision may contain both the declaration of a
> method and the definition of the class that method belongs to, but 
> there
> is no explicit link between the two (no object references from one to 
> the
> other) - only a correspondence of names.  It is only when the code is
> being loaded from the model into the image that those two will be 
> linked
> up.  This makes for much simpler diffing, patching, and merging
> operations, and allows things like class extensions to be modelled with
> minimal fuss, but I have no idea if it would be an appropiate base for
> what you're trying to build.  Can you give me some idea of what that 
> might
> be?

It may be obvious from what Avi said, but I would like to note 
explicitly that Monticello does, in fact, use a declarative model of 
Smalltalk code. I'm interested in refining that model so that it can 
serve as a base for not only versioning, but all sorts of coding tools: 
browsers, debuggers, change sorters, fileout mechanisms, refactoring 
tools, code analyzers etc. It would indeed be excellent.

Colin