[squeak-dev] FormInspector, or also: Text>>#= and its consequences

Thiede, Christoph Christoph.Thiede at student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de
Thu Sep 10 18:32:27 UTC 2020


Hi all,


is there any old thread about the design discussion of how Text>>#= works? (It does not consider attributes for quality.) Has this decision ever been questioned?


Naively and without an overview of any existing components that could rely on this implementation, I would like to question it.

Why should 'foo' asText allBold be equal to 'foo' asText addAttribute: TextURL new? With the same logic, we could also say that two dictionaries are equal iff they have got the same keys ...


There is even a concrete client in the Trunk suffering from this design decision: Marcel's new FormInspector (and analogously, MorphInspector). It uses

TextFontReference with a FormSetFont to display a screenshot right in the inspector pane. Unfortunately, the pane is never updated automatically because even if the screenshot changes, the text morph thinks the old text would equal the new one. I'd like to fix that without hacking any workaround into the inspectors.
Even though this inspector implementation is a bit unusual, in my opinion, it shows that the current Text >> #= implementation might not be a perfect solution.

I'm looking forward to your opinions.

Best,
Christoph
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