Re: [Ginsu-news] Browser question

[<pmc...@li...>]

Well I'd call it a partial misunderstanding,
exacerbated by my inarticulate-ness.  But whatever.

So the thing to do is, decide what the most 'natural'
way is for a Smalltalker to look at those 'special'
definitions.  Iirc, although the right stuff was htere
under the hood, even Team/V never really presented a
good interface for dealing with those definitions. 
(Nor, in fact, any sort of a good UI, but that's
unimportant.)

I think an inspector-like view might be simplest for
people to understand and use - say, one could either
open a Globals view off the Transcript, or one could
right-click-and-open on (e.g.) a Pool and get a
read/write Dictionary inspector.  Or something - this
is 100% off the top of my head, realtime, so perhaps
it's nonsense.  But it does seem to me that a
tree-view-like thing could capture all the 'special'
definitions without intruding too much on the
programmer's experience - an Initializer is really just
any statement that the compiler can live with (aka a
String, with some rules around it), a Global or a
PoolVariable is any arbitrary object (so, present its
printString: result) accessible by a key, and so on.

Point being, I think there's a good, simple solution to
this one ... I'll let you know if/when I come up with a
specific suggestion or two.

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 20:29:47 +0100, "Joseph Pelrine"
wrote:

> 
> Hi Paul
> 
> You misunderstood the question :-)
> 
> First, I'm taking a much lighter approach than in the
> old days (for starters,
> at least). The browsers work on the in-image objects
> (classes, methods), and
> the definitions only get sync'ed up when needed - on
> file-out, for example.
> Less overhead, less problems of semantic integrity.
> 
> The problem I have is how to support browsing and
> modifying stuff that can
> only be captured as a definition - globals,
> initializers, pools and their vars
> - with minimum change to the user's experience. We
> never finished solving that
> problem back in the good ol' days. It may turn out
that
> we'd be best off
> copying the old Digitalk system browser. I like the
> interface much better than
> the VW/StORE stuff (of course, there's much more I
like
> better about the
> Digitalk approach than the VW stuff :-)
> 
> This touches on a central issue in Smalltalk - NO
> browsers adaquately support
> manipulating semantic elements other than classes and
> methods...
> 
> Cheers
> --
> Joseph Pelrine [ | ]
> MetaProg GmbH
> www.metaprog.com
> 
> 
>
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