Namespaces (was: Re: [ANN]A plan for
3.8/4.0...(insertdrumrollhere))
Lothar Schenk
lothar.schenk at gmx.de
Sun Apr 4 08:50:54 UTC 2004
stéphane ducasse wrote:
> ...the idea was you have multiple Smalltalk
> environments (difficult to express again)....
Mmm, that's something I've been idly speculating about. I don't know if this
holds up to the scrutiny of experts, but has anybody ever considered the
possibility of splitting up a Smalltalk system at the image level? It is, a
Smalltalk system should be comprised of multiple images, not just one.
You already have that case (but in an unintegrated manner) when you have a
networked situation with two machines each running a Smalltalk system and
communicating. So, why not have the same situation in your local environment?
You could have several VMs with different images running at the same time, or
even one (reentrant) VM executing several images at once. Not all images need
to incorporate the same components as every other image. I think this is
essentially what classboxes are intended to achieve, to separate one
modification from another.
For example, you could move all of Morphic into one dedicated image and have
all the other images (sans Morphic) communicating with this dedicated
Morphic image for their user interaction (essentially similar to what the
X-Window system does). Or you could have two different Morphics in different
images (maybe one of them a modified version of the other one) and have the
other images communicating with either one or both, if desirable.
I am aware that this raises the question of how to coordinate all these
different images into one coherent whole, which I am not, unfortunately,
qualified to answer. It only seems to me, that this question just might
become more tractable by moving it outside of the scope of any one particular
image or development environment.
As indicated, I am very much a dilettante, here, and my idle ramblings are
supplied for what they're worth: free of charge. :)
Regards, Lothar
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