Damien Pollet schrieb:
> On 8/15/06, stéphane ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
>> I'm fed up to see people coming to squeak and after saying that they
>> use Ruby for scripting (writing small program
>> that perform string manipulations and output some results). We have
>> good regexp packages. For these people having a
>> result printed in a console is important and I would like to have the
>> same possibility in Squeak.  They do not like/understand
>> the idea of an IDE but want to see the results at their prompt.
> 
> To be more precise, Smalltalk gives the impression (at least that's
> what it gives to me as a beginner) of being an autistic system,
> trapped inside its image. A squeak image looks more like yet another
> OS installation to administrate than a tool that integrates in an
> existing OS.

Well, because it is. At least a headed image.

> Mind you I really like Smalltalk because it's so much more clean, but
> right now I'll still use Ruby when I have to write a 20-line script
> just to automate simple stuff. It's simply faster to fire up emacs and
> edit a file than setup a new image, load/create a monticello package,
> etc
> 
> It's not trivial to pipe stuff to/from other shell commands, to give
> arguments from the command line, etc. Basically it's not
> straightforward to use it as a replacement for bash or ruby. So for
> most linux guys I know it seems useless because they can't integrate
> it with their existing tools and habits.

Right - so this really only applies to headless command line use. So why 
not create a special squeak shell for them?

You could create a stripped image with OSProcess preloaded, write a 
small shell script or launcher program (say, "squeash") that runs a 
headless VM with the image, et voilà, Squeak for scripting.

- Bert -