Squeak Project instances and "namespace"

Stephan B. Wessels swessels at one.net
Wed May 21 11:20:30 UTC 2003


How hard would it be to have an instance of Project declare that it 
OPTIONALLY requires it's own instance of the Virtual Machine?

The question may be worded wrong.  Perhaps this had been addressed in 
another form back when many Squeakers were actively discussing modules. 
  That was during a personally difficult time for me, and to keep up 
with what was being discussed, so I offer that excuse if this has 
already been covered.

Here is background for my question.  I'm working on creation of yet 
another Squeak Demo.  And I decided that one objective would be to 
quickly survey books on Squeak as well as make mention of the previous 
volumes of SqueakNews.  I originally thought to fire up old SqueakNews 
images and make screen captures of the front pages to be used as 
Project slides.  The SqueakNews volumes were interesting because they 
were "applications" written in Squeak about Squeak.  The interesting 
thing is you can take the old SqueakNews images, since they were built 
on Squeak 3.x, and launch them using today's Squeak 3.5 VM.  That works 
perfectly.  And the image that gets launched does some interesting 
"application"-styled things to your Squeak environment.  The halos are 
turned off.  You cannot Command-. (break) into the debugger.  It 
appears to be a completely controlled application.

Then I realized what I really wanted was for my Squeak demo to have a 
Project morph that "launched" SqueakNews.  Not a static slide.  And 
then when the quit/or exit door was selected, the Project would just 
exit and take me back as a normal project does today.

This led me to conclude that having the ability of an instance of 
Project have it's own namespace as an option, could be a great thing.  
I still want most of my Project instances to share the morphs, classes 
and other objects that exist in my image.  But I can see the benefit of 
possibly suspending my current environment while inside another project 
as an option.

Is this a description of a difficult fantasy to accomplish?  I'm not 
sufficiently skilled in the low level stuff, at least in Squeak 
(Smalltalk/V I can discuss), to know what's involved here.

Thanks for allowing me to ramble a bit,

  - Steve



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