Two 3.6 issues

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at cs.otago.ac.nz
Fri Oct 24 03:21:07 UTC 2003


I'm marking a student assignment that was written in Squeak.
Several issues came up.  For example, they had no class comments
at all.  I know that seems to be Squeak state of the art, but it
would be nice to have a "nag" mode where every time you touch a
class that has no comment you'd be reminded about it.  It would
certainly have made my life pleasanter...  But that's not 3.6

(1) They used Array2D.  They said that their code would not work
in 3.5 "because of an Array2D bug".  I thought it had been decided
that Array2D would not be included in 3.6 because it is just too
confusing?  (Their code would have been clearer with an array of
arrays anyway.)

(2) They used AlignmentMorph a lot.  I thought AlignmentMorph was
obsolete, with Morphs able to do all that grid layout stuff anyway.
They said that it was because they drew their game characters in
Squeak and found AlignmentMorphs that way.   *SHOULD* people be
using AlignmentMorph in new code?  (I will certainly not penalise
them for doing so, even if the answer is no.)

They also had a fairly severe performance problem; they wanted to have
a grid SketchMorphs, but on a 1.5GHz machine it took *ages* for the
grid to be displayed.  Saving the sketches as GIF files and then using
ImageMorphs instead fixed most of the problem, but why was it so slow
to have a grid (about 12 x 20, IIRC) of sketches?



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