[Enh]pickyWorkspcaes ( [er][et][sm] A first steps to have a bit more awareness of automatic binding )

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Sep 27 11:55:19 UTC 2003


ducasse at iam.unibe.ch wrote:
> 
> What would be cool is to have then the option to reset the binding
> dictionary.
> I think that workspace with automatic binding such as now per defautl in
> Squeak are
> dangerous for novices. So this enh is a first step in increasing the
> awareness 
> of automatic bindings
> 

Have you run into problems here in practice, I suppose?

To add some fuel to the fire, students at GT:

	(a) are maybe 50% aware that workspace variables exist at all.

	(b) maybe 80% of them don't read the menu you get if a variable is
undeclared.

These are very rough guesses, but hopefully they give the idea.  I worry
that if students have to click a confirmation, many students (at least
the kind we have) will simply not use workspace variables.  Workspace
variables are very nice, so that would be a shame.

Perhaps another approach would be to make workspace variables more
visible, so that they realize what they have done if they declare a new
instance variable?  The attached changeset is one I wrote to do this, in
order to help *experienced* programmers.  But the idea seems the same. 
Also, you can remove variables one by one just by doing "remove key"
after you select a variable.

(This code not tested in a while, but it probably still works.)

What do you think?  Does this solve the problem you have been seeing?

-Lex
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