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

ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Sep 27 15:20:56 UTC 2003


Hi lex

I will have a look at your changes
what I can tell you is that we experienced extremely annoying bugs when 
programming with roel
and this was just because some of the binding were corrupted by 
previous runs. So we learned to hate those automatic bindings. So I can 
imagine how disruptive it can be for somebody starting to learn.
Also the fact that everywhere we need to declare variables and not in 
the workspace is not uniform.
In fact for my book environment I removed the automatic binding.

> Have you run into problems here in practice, I suppose?
Oh more than I would have liked. You know the kind of objects that stay 
in the dependents of another one, while you think that it MUST have 
been GCed. And you lose hours like that.
So I like the SB add-ons of ned because the bindings are explicit.


> Workspace variables are very nice, so that would be a shame.
I agre with you so may be having another preferences that removed them 
or put them completely would be better.

> 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?

YES this is the solution but I was not seeing a good way doing that.


> 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?

I like the idea. I would really like to add a preference so that the 
workspace does not have automatic binding. This way people who like 
them like you and people who hate them like me will be happy.
What do yo think about that?

Could you have a look (I remove the module problems) but when we define 
a variable then it is not refreshed in the variable pane (you have do 
hide and re show the variable to see it)?

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I think that this kind of changes are important to improve the 
consistency of the environment.

Stef


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