On 9 mars 04, at 21:46, Frank Caggiano wrote:

> It's been a long time since I worked with any other Smalltalk other 
> than Squeak and the following class initialization situation has me 
> confused.
>
> If a class has a class method 'initialize' when that class is loaded 
> into the system either as a filed in cs, or .st file or if it is 
> loaded via monticello the initialize method is run.
>
> Question: Is this normal smalltalk behavior or is squeak specific? The 
> literature is fuzzy on class initialization.


No it is Smalltalk specific. After each packaging system introduce also 
its own hooks.

>
> Now lets say you have two classes A and B with B being a subclass of A.
> A has a class initialize method, B also has a class initialize method 
> and being a subclass of A it was thought that a super initialize was 
> needed in B to get A to initialize.  What happens in this case is that 
> A's initialize gets run twice.

You should never call a super in the class initialize because it will o 
up the hierarchy and initialize stuff in Object you do not want
such as DependentFields

>
> Question: How should this situation be handled? Should B just assume 
> that if A is in the system (and it must be if B is A's subclass and B 
> is loaded, correct) that A is initialized and not worry about it?

This is the responsibility of a class to be loaded and well initialized.
So you should assume that the superclass is well initialized


> Of course all this came about after 1 1/2 days of tracking down what I 
> thought was a bug but was the above situation so I might be totally 
> wrong about the whole mess.


What I do in my system with newbie smalltalkers I put an empty class 
initialize methods with a big error there so that I can see
what they do when I load their code.

I'm starting to talk liek an old man :)

Stef

>
> regards
> -- 
> Frank Caggiano				"The best education for the best
> caggiano at crystal-objects.com		is the best education for all."
> http://www.crystal-objects.com/		   Robert M. Hutchins
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