Squeak-dev June 2000

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134 participants
686 discussions

Squeak based on SDL ?
by Stefan Matthias Aust 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

Has anybody considered using SDL (the simple direct media layer, see www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL for details) to created the needed screen/io glue code for Squeak's VM? From what I learned in the SDL tutorial, it seems to be ideal. SDL is available for X, Windows and BEOS. There are unofficial (or work-in-progress) ports for Solaris and MacOS. This would allow to create one source for all major platforms. SDL uses DirectX on Windows and X or X/DGA on Unix. THis allows fast and direct, but still platform independent access to the underlying graphics hardware. My current reason, to stay with Windows is the poor graphics performance of the current X port. I think, using DGA (direct graphics access, something like Windows' DirectX for X), a faster Linux VM could be created. But SDL not only defines an API for screen access but also for mouse and keyboard IO. Keyboard IO is currently bad as for example all VM (I know) generate slightly different keycode for not-so-common key combinations. A unified version would help here, too. Finally, SDL defines socket access, sound access (OSS on Linux, DirectSound on Windows) and even a platform independent API for multithreading (pthreads library). Then there're quite a few extension libraries available for free. For example an MPEG video player, CD audio access, true type fonts, multi-channel sound, image reader, multiple guis (not that we'd need this), and last but not least a voxel engine and an MP3 player. bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust // Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf

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Question on Proposals
by Stefan Matthias Aust 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

As anybody is busily fighting for the Pureness of Smalltalk and against the Demons of Other Languages, still under the subject of "Proposal3", may I assume that the other proposals are accepted by the self-declared Orthodoxy of Smalltalk? ;-) No, stop, don't start another flamewar on this! I'm just kidding. Have faith! -- Stefan Matthias Aust \\ Truth Until Paradox

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Supporting Function Keys and Other Keycodes
by Stefan Matthias Aust 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

I'd like to use the usual function keys (F1-F12) in Squeak but I don't know whether the Mac has them or not, that is, I don't know what keycode these keys should emit. Can we have keycodes > 255? Actually, I'd like to have Ins, Del, Pos1, End, PgUp, PgDn generating keycodes > 255 because now, you cannot distinguish crtl+whatever from crtl+special key. That's bad. So what's about using X keycodes (or whatever SDL uses) for example? I think, they've a number for everything on a PC or Unix keyboard. bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust \\ Truth Until Paradox

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Re: [ENH]ScrollPane (scrollBarHidden: true)
by Stefan Matthias Aust 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

At 17:26 23.05.00 -0400, you wrote: >Your final fix here seems to work well. I've updated the changeset on my >website with this fix. >(http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/HiddenScrollBar26.cs) FYI, I made sure that this code works with the latest version and my latest patches and proposed it for adding. I can't really tell how I could life without that setting before ;-) bye

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Re: [ENH] Minor extensions to butFirst and butLast methods
by Dan Ingalls 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

"David N. Smith $IBM$" <dnsmith(a)watson.ibm.com> wrote... >Here are some extensions to SequenceableCollection that I use all the time. There are a couple of similar methods, allButFirst and allButLast, but these are unforgiving in that they burp when asked for a character and it isn't there. > >These are all forgiving; asking for the last 5 characters of a 3 character string answers the last three characters. I've found this much more useable in practice, allowing me to virtually never have to write #copyFrom:to: which is all to easy to get wrong (off by one errors). > >Class SequenceableCollection: > butFirst Answer all but the first character > butFirst: n Answer all but the first n characters > butLast Answer all but the last character > butLast: n Answer all but the last n characters > first: n Answer the first n characters > last: n Answer the last n characters I agree with the convenience of extending the current first/allButFirst pattern to N items -- there are a number of places in the system already where this would help. I'm skeptical about the value of forgiveness in such code. For one thing, it often delays the appearance of bugs to where they are more confusing. For another, it often turns out that tests are needed elsewhere anyway, when results come from "forgiving" code -- ie, you don't really know how many items you actually got, whereas you do with strict code. I'm opposed to having BOTH an allButFirst family AND a butFirst family of methods in the release (but of course it's a fine distinction for maintaining this package as a goodie). My counter-proposal for the release itself would be to extend the current family to N items, using "allBut" naming and strict code. - Dan PS: Note that once you have the N-item versions, it's quite easy to write forgiving code where you really want it, as in str first: (3 min: str size).

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Porting Chapter!
by Mark Guzdial 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

Ian Piumarta's chapter on how to port Squeak is now posted at http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/22 (YAY!). Reviews would be most appreciated! Mark -------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies. Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/ (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

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Syntax & Sematics [was: Re: [Enough already] Re: Proposal3: Make $_ ..]
by Mats Nygren 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

JArchibald(a)aol.com wrote: > => 6/1/00 12:36:59 AM EDT, ok(a)atlas.otago.ac.nz [personal communication] => > << The great ideas in Smalltalk are semantic. They'll survive the new > additional Squeak syntax (whatever it happens to look like). And they'll > survive underscores. >> > > I agree completely. I tend to think of a Smalltalk program as a semantic > construct associated with the parse tree for that program. The nature of this > semantic construct is unfortunately ungrounded, somewhat waving the the air. > [snip] I to agree completely, and have planned to show some results to this list during the year. My main idea is to assign parse trees an important role, the compiler should take a parse tree, how that was contructed is non of its business. I have already experimented with this using Squeak-like, C-like, Python-like, Scheme-like syntaxes. (But outside of Squeak, which is new to me). And within each many variations are possible. To make it all work there need to be bijective mappings between the syntaxes which need some thought and some work. In this framework I can write things for C-compilation in any of the syntaxes above (the Squeak-syntax being of course quite similar to Slang). It is also possible to write Squeak-code (for fileIn) in Python-syntax. In short, syntax and semantics shuold be separated. Both will benefit. Semantics (for example the Squeak execution environment) will be available in more ways. And syntaxes can be used for more purposes. I sincerely hope that at least some of the people on this list will take an interest in this line of development. It will take some time before I am more acquainted with Squeak internals and have ported this material into it. This will be my MSc thesis (never finished that), with your support it will be an enjoyable work and should lead to a nice and well documented structure on the syntax handling in Squeak. I also add that IMO the structure of C code generation (Slang) will be improved with this and the language Slang will mature somewhat. Another important consideration of course is the SqC work in this direction. We will soon hear about this I hope. A simple example. Each maps to each other via a parsetree, assuming one of several identifier mappings. Note that comments are preserved. Also note that there are two different Squeak-versions, one could turn into the other in (seemingly) no time. " example " x < y ifTrue: [ fooBar _ 1 ] ifFalse: [ fooBar _ 2 ] " example " x < y ifTrue: [ foo_bar := 1 ] ifFalse: [ foo_bar := 2 ] // example if (x < y) foo_bar = 1; else foo_bar = 2; ; example (if (< x y) (set! foo-bar 1) (set! foo-bar 2)) # example if x < y: fooBar = 1 else: fooBar = 2 Many things remains to be said on the matter but I end for now. Cheers, /Mats Nygren

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Re: www.squeakworld.com!
by Mats Nygren 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

"Göran" Hultgren <gohu(a)rocketmail.com> wrote: > Hi fellow Squeakers! > > This is a call for assistance. > > I plan to launch (in all humbleness though!) an "e-zine" about Squeak and directly related > technology (Comanche, Siren etc.) - in short, a place for all us Squeakers to hang out. :-) > .. Let me be early in stating my support for this. I will happily write things once in a while when I have time, and when it gets accepted by the editors. I have some special interests as can be seen on my swiki-page, and probably will be further drveloped with time. If you want to give space to any of this your e-zine can be a good medium for that. Perhaps a good place to start is to edit material from this list into article-size pieces. That would be a good thing I believe. How do plan to draw the line between the following: - the squeak list - the squeak swiki - the squeakworld I agree with some other posting that a more structured place than the swiki and the list is a good thing. /Mats Nygren

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RE: BCPL in the new millenium (was: Proposal3: Make $_ a valid id entifier character
by Parker, Mike 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

> On Wed, May 31, 2000 at 12:01:59PM +1200, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote: > > > > Long pause while I find an Alto BCPL manual. > > BCPL fans and committed retrocomputing enthusiasts should bookmark > Martin Richards' web site at: > > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/ > > Here you will find an up to date BCPL manual, portable implementions > of BCPL and MCPL, a Tripos command shell, and other fun stuff. > > Anyone care to implement SLANG translation to BCPL? We could have > Squeak running in a BCPL virtual machine under a Tripos monitor > hosted on Linux using Dr. Richards' latest work. Alternatively, > hosting BCPL/Tripos in a Squeak image might be interesting. Maybe, once I finish porting them down to the Palm Pilot and bolting a proper garbage collector under MCPL.

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Cheap updates
by Bert Freudenberg 01 Jun '00

01 Jun '00

Hi all per-minute online time paying Squeakers, I just discovered a nice method to fetch updates without updating the system which sometimes takes a while for recompiling. Just put the following statement into the "do..." menu: Utilities readServerUpdatesSaveLocally: true updateImage: false -- Bert

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