Binaries in Monticello

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Sat Feb 14 09:39:48 UTC 2004


On Feb 14, 2004, at 12:20 AM, ducasse wrote:

> Yes this is another possibility. we can always as a large table with 
> data/annotations on other entities.
> But this means that tools will have to be adapted anyway. So at the 
> end I think the cleanest way is to have other entities.

Those aren't the only two options.  There's no reason the Class object 
couldn't itself have more sophisticated information about itself, eg, 
actual objects for each inst var instead of just a list of names (is 
there?).  That's the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

> The idea with Ginsu is that you could have different version of the 
> same class loaded in parallel and other. I think that joseph would be 
> better to answer this question that I the morning.

> This is also a way to have a clear separation between run-time 
> entities and declarations. This way you can code in Squeak code for 
> Squat or another Smalltalk.

It comes down to whether you want to be editing live objects or "dead" 
representations of them - that is, are your tools operating on the same 
instances that the VM is or not?  I'm biased towards the former, though 
I can certainly see the advantages to the latter.  But I think those 
advantages are better achieved by working on things like mirrors... 
that is, I don't want to introduce an indirection that is only used by 
part of the system (like the Browser), but if the indirection were 
consistently used throughout we might gain by it.

It's likely too late for me to be making any sense, so I'll stop there. 
:)

> This was what they did at Digitalk and I think that they were right. 
> At least they had the manpower to think and do it.

Just because they thought about it doesn't mean we shouldn't too... ;)




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