Squeak-dev September 1998

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

108 participants
197 discussions

Re: ANSI compatibility [was: Re: nil or #nil?]
by R. A. Harmon 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

At 11:13 AM 9/21/98 -0700, Dan Ingalls wrote: [snip] >THE BIGGER ISSUE >As you (may) know ANSI compatibility is of no importance to me, *except* that >I know it affects the synergy of this community with the larger Smalltalk >community, and that *is* important to me. > >A possible process for moving forward here would be for "a few good Squeakers" >to step forward and work together to propose some reasonable set of changes that >would maximize ANSI compatibility, while minimizing any detriment to Squeak's >current direction. What I have in mind is a sort of "10 most wanted" changes >rather than a massive overhaul. [snip] >So, maybe folks would like to propose their "10 most wanted" changes for >compatibility, and/or announce their willingness to work together over the next >month or so to assemble such a package. My role would be limited to reviewing > suggestions and code, and coordinating an orderly progress of code updates. I'm still learning Smalltalk and am self taught--it shows. Most of my experience is with Smalltalk Express (SE) and some with Squeak and Dolphin Smalltalk. I have implemented a flawed, first-cut, pre-alpha, proof-of-concept, partial implementation of the proposed ANSI standard Smalltalk in Smalltalk Express (SE). Partial because the ScaledDecial class and a few other methods have not been implemented as I just didn't know how to do some things. I've ported the SIF reader/writer, and the Fundamental, Valuable and, Exception protocols to Squeak. I have not posted it publicly because I wanted to implement it in a fairly platform independent way (possibly with macros), hoped to get some help getting exceptions reliably implemented, get some feedback on implementing the SIF format reader/writer better, and get a ScaledDecial implementation. Given my slow pace, and Dan's suggestion, I think it's time for me ask if there anyone interested in taking a look at my ANSI exception handling stuff to see if they can make it reliable, or at the SIF format reader/writer to see if it is an acceptable for a first release. If so, in a week or so I will mail them the SIF reader/writer, and the Fundamental, Valuable and, Exception protocols to Squeak that I've got so far. I'll finish up porting the rest of the ANSI stuff which won't take more than 2 - 4 weeks. With reliable exception, an acceptable SIF reader/writer first release, and rest of the ANSI stuff, I'll then post the complete Squeak proposed ANSI standard Smalltalk enhancement. I think with a swiki page for people to add bug reports and fixes for them the community would produce in a relatively short time a robust, reliable, reasonably compliant Squeak proposed ANSI standard Smalltalk enhancement that we might want to incorporate into the base Squeak. I would not be able to coordinate the effort as I don't play all that well with others. If no one is interested, has the time, or is able to square away exceptions, I'll keep plugging away at it. I might take me a fair amount of time to understand exceptions fully enough to get it right. I know my stuff isn't ready for prime time and I have no idea if it is acceptable, usable, or completely useless as I haven't worked with anyone else. I'm pretty sure that it would be useful for folks to at least see the pieces (what messages in what classes) are probable required by ANSI. I think if folks are presented with all the pieces, correcting or re-implementing some things is easier than trying to build the whole thing or even trying to build subsystems of it. Note I started with VSExceptions for Squeak and after unmercifully hacking it up beyond recognition to add the ANSI stuff, I think it works. Some of the exception methods dealing with resumption aren't implemented or don't work. I'm completely out of my depth with exceptions. The SIF format reader/writer is very fragile, and I think the ugliest implementation I can imagine. It reads and writes ANSI SIF files just fine, but my teeth hurt every time I look at the implementation code. I'm now doing a second cut at the SIF format reader/writer. I haven't documented my stuff yet so that it is usable for folks without a GREAT deal of perseverance and an extensive Smalltalk knowledge so they can follow my clumsy code. I would love to have others try it out, find bugs, implement those areas I have deferred, and just generally give me comments (good or bad), suggestions, and alternatives. -- Richard A. Harmon "The only good zombie is a dead zombie" harmonra(a)webname.com E. G. McCarthy

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Re: Toward a great Mini Squeak for PDA's
by Dan Ingalls 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

Brian - >I have a port of the 1.2VM that runs on the NEC MobilePro 700 in 8mb (4+4) >under CE 2.0 (which uses a similar MIPS R4000 >family CPU to the one used in theCassiopeias). It almost certainly will run >in much less than 8mb, but I haven't needed to try that. >I can post that version to the UIUC archive if there is any interest. >My hunch is that it would come up on something like the Casio E-10 >out-of-the-box. Well, it would seem that the best way to approach this is as a matrix of versions and machines. We probably should make a directory item Squeak For PDAs, that would include Squeak For PDAs ReadMe.txt MiniSqueak1.2 image and changes for Sq1.2 VMs for Sq1.2 ... MiniSqueak2.2 image and changes for Sq2.2 VMs for Sq2.2 ... The ReadMe file would list a bunch of available PDAs, giving for each the files needed to run Squeak 1.2 or 2.2 or both, and a few notes about installation and any UI quirks (such as Pen behavior, command keys, etc). I will start by setting up the directories, and moving the existing Squeak1.2CE.zip to the appropriate place, and assembling what documentation there is to go with it. Then you can try that with your VM. If it works, send me the VM, and installation info, and I'll put them on the server. Your 1.2 VM may run a 2.2 image as well. I am astounded to find that my 1.21d VM from over a year ago will run the Squeak 2.2 release (it must be decompressing compressed fonts without primitive assistance, but i can't tell ;-). I'll put out a 2.2 image as soon as we have done one pass of error-proofing and improved shrinking -- probably next week. Thanks - Dan

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Squeak on a Psion (Was: Squeak on Palm III)
by Bob Ingria 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

Since the issue of Squeak/Smalltalk on a PDA has come up, I have to ask if there is anybody out there working on a port of Squeak/Smalltalk to a Psion. I imagine the Series 5 would be a more likely candidate than the Series 3 machines, since the 5 is 32-bit, whereas the others are 16. Perspiring minds want to know. -30- Bob Ingria

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Re: Squeak on Palm III (Repeat of my earlier response)
by wirth＠almaden.ibm.com 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

Markus Kohler said: >As far as I know the Pilot processort is not 32 Bit. >Therefore porting Squeak could be difficult. With respect to memory addressing, the current instances of Palm OS machines (i.e., Pilots) use the Motorola Dragonball processor, a 68K instruction set. Palm OS also uses the early Mac 68K memory model and calling conventions. Therefore, developers have all the early-Mac problems of "near" vs. "far" addressing, limits on code segments greater than 32KB, etc. The current Pilot hardware has 24 address lines, so it is possible to address 16 MB of memory (I have a third-party, TRG, memory card in my Palm III that has 2 MB of flash memory and 8 MB of RAM). The issue of porting Squeak to Palm OS keeps coming up, so I'll repeat my earlier msg below. The current update is that there is an undocumented system call in Palm OS that can be used to get around the memory write protection (MemSemaphoreReserve(), see "really bad news" below), but the issues of having to break up the Squeak heap into 32KB "pages" still remain. I also still have good intentions to return to this porting effort sometime, but I've got one other (experimental) handheld device port to worry about first :-) Mike Wirth =========================================== Please respond to squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu, Craig.Latta(a)NetJam.org cc: Michael Wirth/Almaden/IBM Subject: Re: (Status of) Palm III port? Craig, et al, I've spent a fair bit of time digging into the technical issues of porting Squeak to the Palm OS. (BTW, John Maloney has been extremely helpful in assisting this effort, resulting in the "minimal port" C file that he recently released. Thanks, John.) I originally thought that the release of Palm OS 3.0 (on the Palm III device) would solve the critical problems. But it didn't. Here's a copy of an earlier (6/29/98) message that I circulated privately on this topic: ========================================== I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is: * Palm OS 3.0 SDK final (docs, sample code, headers, etc.) is now out. * We have our TRG memory cards for the Palm III (2 MB flash, 8(!) MB RAM) * We expect to get our Palm III's RSN :-) * Palm Computing has taken over the CoPilot, the Pilot emulator (runs on Windows, Mac and elsewhere), and upgraded it to Palm OS 3.0. * Heaps in "storage memory" (where Palm databases live) are no longer limited to 64 KB. In Palm OS 3.0, all available RAM (after allocating a 96 KB "dynamic heap") is put in a single heap. * I went on a trip to NY for business last week and finally had a number of hours of undisturbed time on the airplane and in the motel to pour over the memory management description in the Palm OS 3.0 docs. The bad news is: * Palm database records (which is where all the RAM is) are not supposed to contain any memory pointers (or even handles) because the Palm memory mgr wants to be able to move records around (and in the general case, Palm OS supports removable memory cards -- but not in the current hardware -- which would cause card base addresses to move around as a card was moved between slots). * Palm database "records" = memory allocation "chunks" (with a little bit of record header info at the front) are still limited to 64K!!! This actually doesn't seem too bad :-) I can force the mem mgr to not move my (Squeak heap) records around by locking down the handles. I can relocate the pointers when Squeak starts up or shuts down (or when a card is moved -- someday) Keeping the Squeak heap in a collection of Palm database records would actually be a "good thing". Then we could use the normal Palm desktop synchronization facilities to backup/restore the Squeak image to/from the desktop. And if new/changed Squeak objects are localized, then the sync only has to copy part of the image/database. I'm presuming I can rewrite Squeak's "new" method (and a few other places) to allocate objects within this "paged"/db-record environment without too much trouble. But, of course, the GC may be affected. But the REALLY BAD! news is: * You can't directly write into a database record (i.e., storage memory). The memory is write-protected. You have to go through a memcopy function that does some bounds checking and unprotects/reprotects storage memory around the actually copy operation. I suppose the idea is to protect user databases from errant applications at all costs (indeed! :-) But I see this "feature" as deadly to a Squeak (or any OO runtime) for two reasons: -- I'd have to change the compiler to code every write to go thru this interface, as well as accomodate it in the platform-support C code. -- I'm sure the performance hit will be significant (I'll code it up and do some timing tests :-) on an already marginal platform. I suspect the answer will be that I have to cheat and disable this write-protection somehow. If all else fails, I'll get Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing) to tell me how when he visits Almaden in July (I'm supposed to host a visit for him and a team from Palm :-) Any ideas? What percentage of bytecodes executed are writes to objects (as opposed to the stack)? ========================================== Update: 1. We got (and are enjoying :-) our Palm IIIs. 2. I haven't had time to code up the mentioned timing tests on the Palm OS API for copying to database records. 3. Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky have left 3Com/Palm Computing, raising several questions about the future of the platform and our interaction with it :-) 4. Lately I've been working on another port to an experimental handheld device. Anybody out there in Squeak-land have any better info on Palm OS or ideas? I'd still like to see this port happen. Mike Wirth IBM Almaden Research Center <<usual disclaimers>>

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RE: Squeak on a Psion (Was: Squeak on Palm III)
by Kevin Driedger 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

I am very interested in this as well. I was going to take a stab at it myself given the encouraging news that I read on this mailing list (Squeak). Perhaps, Tim Rowledge could give us a bit of an update. Tim, is there anything that I could help you out with? Kevin. > -----Original Message----- > From: Bob Ingria [SMTP:ingria@world.std.com] > Sent: Thursday, September 24, 1998 10:36 AM > To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Cc: recipient.list.not.shown; @cs.uiuc.edu@nfsbrute > Subject: Squeak on a Psion (Was: Squeak on Palm III) > > Since the issue of Squeak/Smalltalk on a PDA has come up, I have to ask if > there is anybody out there working on a port of Squeak/Smalltalk to a > Psion. I imagine the Series 5 would be a more likely candidate than the > Series 3 machines, since the 5 is 32-bit, whereas the others are 16. > Perspiring minds want to know. > > -30- > Bob Ingria >

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ChangeSet fix
by sqrmax＠cvtci.com.ar 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

Hi. Recently, I've had serious problems dealing with the ChangeSorter. I've been able to pin down the trouble: if you create a class, then delete it, and then create it again, then your change set is broken. The class will be still marked 'deleted', and so your change set fileouts will end with 'Smalltalk removeClass:...', and so your changes won't be saved after filing them in. Moreover, I've found change sets with references to class names that are not symbols. Although I think this is my fault I've included a facility to fix such broken change sets. Their illness is that you can't delete certain changes from the set, because after you delete them they're still there. Here is the change set with the fixes. Please check them, I don't have much experience fixing this kind of things (it looks ok, though). Andres. Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="ChangeS0.cs" Content-Disposition: attachment; Filename="ChangeS0.cs" Attachment converted: Anon:ChangeS0.cs (????/----) (00003313)

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Re: Squeak on Palm III
by Gerardo Richarte 24 Sep '98

24 Sep '98

Markus Kohler said: > There's already a Smalltalk on the Palm Pilot. > See http://www.tiac.net/users/ajb/pocketst/index.html I tried this Smalltalk, it's a good alternative for Smalltalk & Pilot programmers, but it doesn't run on the Pilot. It's a Windows enviroment to develop applications. This enviroment can't run code, it doesn't have a Virtual Machine (or it's hidden very well), and it's not finished yet. But it's still a good alternative for Smalltalk programers that want to do Pilot applications (like me...) Portable Bye! Richie++

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Re[2]: Does Squeak include a generic node class?
by Jerome.Garcia＠wj.com 23 Sep '98

23 Sep '98

Apparently some of my responses related to the posts on this subject disappeared into the bit bucket. I apologize. Here is a summary of my responses. Please do not take my question as a complaint. I was simply thinking about implementation of something similar to the following hierarchy which was useful in the past: TreeNode Expression RelationalDatabaseExpression SQLExpression SQLRequest SQLSelectStatement SQLUpdateStatement SQLInsertStatement SQLClause SQLInsert SQLSelect SQLUpdate SQLFrom SQLWhere SQLHaving SQLOrderBy . . . And so forth down to the lowest level SQL primitives since everything in SQL is an expression. If there is a better way of representing the above, I would love to know. I can understand the difficulty of getting general agreement on how best to design and implement a base class for all uses. Was this caused by fundamental differences on the most primitive uses or because there was a desire to do too much in such a base class? I will definitely take a look at TreeWorks80. Thanks for your responses. Jerome jegarcia(a)adventurousmind.com ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: Does Squeak include a generic node class? Author: Sam Adams <ssadams(a)us.ibm.com> at INTERNET Date: 9/22/98 2:46 PM Nope, but I just posted the code for TreeWorks80.cs to UIUC. It should be available in a couple of days under the name 'TreeWorks80.cs'. TreeWorks80 was a comprehensive set of models, editors, views and controllers for hierarchical structures. It was originally written by Lynn Fogwell and Ken Auer at KSC in the early 90's, and was included in the KSC ST archives that were released last year. I ported the code to Squeak 1.23 and it worked fine there, along with the rest of the KSC libraries and my compatibility mods to the image. I haven't ported it to 2.1+ yet, but the model objects at least should work fine. Regards, Sam Sam S. Adams, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Network Computing Software Division tie line 444-0736, outside 919-254-0736, email: ssadams(a)us.ibm.com <<Hebrews 11:6, Proverbs 3:5-6, Romans 1:16-17, I Corinthians 1:10>>

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Problem with Swiki in 2.2beta
by bobh＠agents.com 23 Sep '98

23 Sep '98

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who's contributed to the 2.2beta. This stuff is great! Lately, I've been playing with PWS and Swiki a fair amount. I really like the RenderingSwikiAction in the 2.2beta, however I'm seeing the following problem: After rendering some pages (a few dozen times) in a testSwiki, network operations on my system stop working. It appears that Squeak is not closing its TCP streams after FTPing the swiki page to the remote server. Quiting and re-running Squeak solves the problem. Is anyone else having problems with RenderingSwikiAction or FTPSocket? I'm running on a Mac G3 with OS 8.1. Also, how many other folks are using PWS on a regular basis? Would anyone else like to have PWS started automatically? Perhaps this would be a good preference to add to the 2.2beta. The enclosed change file (762 bytes) hard codes the PWS startup. I'd like to see this (or something better) added to 2.2. Comments? Thanks, Bob Houston Attachment converted: Anon:PWS-StartUp.cs (TEXT/MSIE) (00003303)

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What about http://c2.com:8080/WelcomeVisitors
by Carsten Haerle 23 Sep '98

23 Sep '98

For a couple of days, I am not able to access http://c2.com:8080/WelcomeVisitors anymore. Does someone know what happened? Did the address change? It was a quite good source of information. How about changing the Squeak Homepage to reside on a Wiki-Server? Regards Carsten

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