SmalltalkImage current

subbukk subbukk at gmail.com
Fri Jun 29 10:29:54 UTC 2007


On Friday 29 June 2007 11:32 am, stephane ducasse wrote:
> you can find the complete motivation in the archives but in a
> nutshell the point
> was that Smalltalk is a namespace and that over time it agglomerates
> a lot of extra behavior (sometimes junk) that has nothing to do with
> namespace management.
> But with bookkeeping of the image. We tried to clean it up but we
> also stopped in the middle
> since we were pissed off by complains.
That Smalltalk is just a namespace is not obvious. SystemDictionary's comment 
reads "I represent a special dictionary that supports protocol for asking 
questions about the structure of the system" :-(. In the absence of explicit 
objects representing VM (SmalltalkVM?), object memory 
(SmalltalkObjectMemory?) and so on, it is natural that methods gets 
aggregated in Smalltalk.

"Smalltalk osVersion" looks easy and intuitive while "SmalltalkImage current 
osVersion" is cumbersome and counter-intuitive because the image is OS 
independent. osVersion makes sense only when an image is being interpreted by 
a particular VM process. If we had a SmalltalkVM object, then "Smalltalk 
osVersion" could be deprecated.

Of course, it is easy for me to say this now. hindsight is 20/20 :-)

Regards .. Subbu K. K.



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