On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 09:43:12AM -0800, Dr Strange wrote:
>
> I'm working with number theory.... yeah I know, why would I choose VB, Delphi... loooong story (nopun intended), my data set and current code is immense so I can't port it all in a short period of time, yet.... But perhaps I can create a small applet in Squeak, compile a small utility to exe and then shell out from my current app and get the num string generated to text by the squeak applet and pull the value in, cumbersome, but if it works in the mean time?  
>  
> You guys mentioned Smalltalk can generate to .DLL?  Could I design a small utility in Squeak and then easily port the code to Smalltalk and then generate the DLL callable to my current app?  If so that would be GREAT!

Well, I guess I have a couple of suggestions then. First, grab a copy of Squeak
and play around with arithmetic a little bit. You can do everything interactively
in a workspace, or better yet in a debugger, which lets you step through the
arithmetic calculations in as much detail as you want. That will give you enough
of a feel for it to consider whether to move your application to Squeak. I think
you'll probably find that Squeak is a really nice environment for the kind of
work you are doing, but you'll have to think about whether it's worth rewriting
a lot of your other code, I can't really say.

As far a shelling out to a "Squeak utility", yes you can do it, but I don't think
it's a good way to do accomplish what you want. It would be kludgy and probably
slow considering that you would be starting up a Squeak image every time you ran
a calculation.  Slightly better would be to keep Squeak running, and talk to it
through perhaps a socket connection.  If you do want to try something like this,
you might want to run it with GNU Smalltalk rather than Squeak. I don't personally
use GNU Smalltalk (but wait a minute, here it is on my new Linux installation,
maybe I should give it a try), but I know that it is much more command line
oriented than Squeak, and you might find it more suitable for running short
Smalltalk scripts.

Dave