Squeak-dev May 2001

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143 participants
597 discussions

RE: Squeak for 3-year-olds
by G.J.Tielemans＠dinkel.utwente.nl 03 May '01

03 May '01

I love Squeakland: - It sits convenient in my webbrowser and only if I grow in my wishes I have to download the stand-alone-Squeaks that ask more study but offer also more power. - especially the tutorials with the workspace area and the scrolling tutorial together in one window steal my heart. (Dan and Scott, you could look at these pages for an inspiring format for your own tutorials?) (By the way, a question button, combined with a most-often-asked-FAQ-box would make these pages complete for exercising visitors.) Small remarks: - Near the end of the race-car tutorial i miss at least one picture in the part about colorUnder. - If I end a visit to an example on the "Early Play and Exploration" page, pressing the back button of my browser (Windows98 IE 5.50.4522.1800) sends me back to the page Squeak in Schools: I would prefer to be moved to the early play & exploration page. (The same for creating animations: - I use the back-button instead of using the previous project in the World Menu - depends of the target group you are aiming at..) - I did allow you (?) to install the new plugin update on May 3 when I was asked for it, but now the circus project does not load correct anymore, like it did last thursday. (Carny show is still not found, so it opens a new window...) - I have a screen with 1024x768, but that is not big enough for the Creating animation page. (I do not see a scroll bar to overcome this show-the-bottom-of-the-page-problem. Looking more secure, I see that more pages suffer this problem.) - a related problem is that the introduction text Etoys and SimStories is covered by the graphics part? I cannot see the end-of-the-rows, so reading is now quit an adventure game. -(Text with underline in the same storie does not function as hyperlinks, is that correct?) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ At 7:38 PM +0200 5/1/01, Cees de Groot wrote: >Sidetracking a bit on the topic of Squeak in education: my kids don't >happen to read English. Has anyone looked into i18n for Etoys? remark 1: You should differentiate between the English control commands of Squeaks and the long English explaining text-tutorilas. The first discussion about the commands we had already with Logo in 1984. Some people were saying that children difficulty to learn it because it was in English. Others were saying that not the English words but grasping the concepts behind the words was the difficulty. You could always make an end on these discussions by reminding them that in the sixties(?) there was that Walt Disney movie Mary Poppins with this magic spell SUPERCALLIFRAGILOUSCUMEXPIALIDOCIOUS, no problem for any child in these days. (I think I write it wrong now..) remark 2: Is it an idea to translate the tutorials with volunteers in other languages and put it back in stores on the website of Squeakland? (building some fancy buttons where you can choose your preferred langauge must be challenging for real Squeakers..) remark 3: You could also overcome the reading of English and other limitations of these not so flexible computers (Alan is warning for this again and again..) by giving them a human helper... Yes YOU!!! In music education they offer in our music-school parents the opportunity to take the first music lessons together with their own child. (Helps them to understand how difficult it is to start playing a music-instrument and doing all these boring exercises while you see yourself already on the stage: Some grown-up men still have these dreams, we call it air-guitar-syndrome.) Could be an idea to start play along tutorials on the website: the race-car tutorial is a good candidate for that. (Solves also part of the problem of offering a tutorial with enough room to make mistakes and still having the opportunity to bring them back on trail. We only should learn not to help them then to much... )

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Re: Squeak install problem: Where do I go for help?
by Bruce ONeel 03 May '01

03 May '01

john <john(a)johnknight.com> wrote: > Bruce, > Thanks. Your hint solved my problem. > However, I am using squeak on a i486 with 48M RAM. > It is too slow to be usable. > > Thanks > John I have some slow systems and they are more usable if you use MVC rather than Morphic. Click on the background, choose open... from the menu, and then choose MVC project. It will be faster. Maybe not fast enough :-) cheers bruce

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Re: Comments on Smalltalk block closure designs, part 1
by Roel Wuyts 03 May '01

03 May '01

Well, it's not my thing (I mean whatever Stephan decides is up to him; he's doing the implementation), so I'm somewhat reluctant to give much comments. However, I'm afraid that slow block closures will just remain there for another five years, I guess, until someone Stephan II decides to make them quicker and has to go through all that learning again... That said, if Stephane implements 'slow blockclosures' or 'fast ones' I'll definetely buy him a beer (or whatever) whenever I encounter him ! Go Stephan ! On 30/04/01 21:33, "danielv(a)netvision.net.il" <danielv(a)netvision.net.il> wrote: > I've been following this thread with interest, and reading Stephan's > meta- reasons, I just have to agree. Do the simplest thing that could > work, and "simple" is relative - if you know how to do it, it's simple. > > If Squeak gets block closures (even slow ones), there'll probably be > various good things that will happen in consequence (code will break and > be fixed, ports of software that needed closures will be untwisted, so > forth). > > If someone then takes on the implementation challange of "The Allen > proposal", integrating it with J3 for better performance, we'll all be > happy, but we probably won't be affected much (another X0% performance > for Squeak? we'll all smile, and continue doing precisely what we we're > doing before). > > Stephan, if at some point you see what you were doing does get complex > and Allen's proposal seems to be getting simpler, you can always change > directions later. > > Daniel > -- Roel Wuyts Software Composition Group Roel.Wuyts(a)iam.unibe.ch University of Bern, Switzerland Board member of the European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org

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Re: Matrix class?
by Richard A. O'Keefe 03 May '01

03 May '01

Jeff Shipman <shippy(a)nmt.edu> wrote: Is there a Matrix class available in Squeak? If so, where is it in the browser? Thanks. Did you look under "Collections-Arrayed"? The Array2D class comment says Neither storing nor storing (otherwise inherited from ArrayedCollections) will work. Neither comparing nor most accessing methods inherited from SequenceableCollection will work. Actually, it's been a bad idea to inherit this class from Collection at all. (This should say "for this class to inherit from Collection", of course.) There's not actually a lot in that class. It might be fun for you to list the full protocol of the class, strip out the methods inherited from Object, and figure out which other ancestral methods actually work, then submit a new version that _doesn't_ inherit from Collection. According to Cmd-N, "There are no Users of Array2D" in the 3.0 base image. You might find the following method useful. Array2D class>> width: width height: height from: aCollection "Create an Array2D with width places in the first dimension and height places in the second dimension, with initial contents drawn from aCollection" ^(self width: width height: height) setContents: aCollection copy Or you might not. Array2D _does_ have methods like #+ defined on it, but they don't work. So I guess it doesn't count as a Matrix.

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[ENH] Generating HTML with left- and up- arrows
by Richard A. O'Keefe 03 May '01

03 May '01

I don't know about you, but I'm a bit sick of seeing returns and assignments coming out as circumflex and low line when I do a printOut from a browser. I can just about live with circumflex, but low line? HTML 4 came out in 1999. Some mistakes were corrected and HTML 4.01 issued at the end of 1999. HTML 4 includes entity names for a _lot_ of characters, including in particular these two: <!ENTITY larr CDATA "←" -- leftwards arrow, U+2190 ISOnum --> <!ENTITY uarr CDATA "↑" -- upwards arrow, U+2191 ISOnum--> Here's a change set that makes the printOut feature of the browser generate HTML files using ↑ for return and ← for assignment. The whole thing needs to be overhauled to use an array of strings so that many of the other characters in the Squeak character set are written properly too. In particular, String>>asHtml is _nasty_; all that copying. It didn't _work_ until I changed HtmlFileStream>>nextPut:. I'm not sure how necessary the other changes are, but it seems plausible that String>>asHtml should be consistent with HtmlFileStream>>nextPut:. 'From Squeak2.7 of 5 January 2000 [latest update: #1782] on 3 May 2001 at 8:05:23 pm'! !HtmlFileStream methodsFor: 'fileIn/Out' stamp: 'raok 5/3/2001 20:00'! nextChunk "Answer the contents of the receiver, up to the next terminator character (!!). Imbedded terminators are doubled. Undo and strip out all Html stuff in the stream and convert the characters back. 4/12/96 tk" | out char did rest | self skipSeparators. "Absorb <...><...> also" out _ WriteStream on: (String new: 500). [self atEnd] whileFalse: [ self peek = $< ifTrue: [self unCommand]. "Absorb <...><...>" (char _ self next) = $& ifTrue: [ rest _ self upTo: $;. did _ out position. rest = 'lt' ifTrue: [out nextPut: $<]. rest = 'gt' ifTrue: [out nextPut: $>]. rest = 'amp' ifTrue: [out nextPut: $&]. rest = 'uarr' ifTrue: [out nextPut: $^]. rest = 'larr' ifTrue: [out nextPut: $_]. did = out position ifTrue: [ self error: 'new HTML char encoding'. "Please add it to this code"]] ifFalse: [char = $!! "terminator" ifTrue: [ self peek = $!! ifFalse: [^ out contents]. out nextPut: self next] "pass on one $!!" ifFalse: [char asciiValue = 9 ifTrue: [self next; next; next; next "TabThing"]. out nextPut: char]] ]. ^ out contents! ! !HtmlFileStream methodsFor: 'read, write, position' stamp: 'raok 5/3/2001 20:01'! nextPut: char "Put a character on the file, but translate it first. 4/6/96 tk 1/1/98 acg" char = $< ifTrue: [^ super nextPutAll: '<']. char = $> ifTrue: [^ super nextPutAll: '>']. char = $& ifTrue: [^ super nextPutAll: '&']. char = $_ ifTrue: [^ super nextPutAll: '←']. char = $^ ifTrue: [^ super nextPutAll: '↑']. char asciiValue = 13 "return" ifTrue: [self command: 'br']. char = $ "tab" ifTrue: [self verbatim: TabThing. ^super nextPut: char]. ^ super nextPut: char! ! !String methodsFor: 'converting' stamp: 'raok 5/3/2001 19:53'! asHtml "Do the basic character conversion for HTML. Leave all original return and tabs in place, so can conver back by simply removing bracked things. 4/4/96 tk" | temp | temp _ self copyReplaceAll: '&' with: '&'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: '<' with: '<'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: '>' with: '>'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: '_' with: '←'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: '^' with: '↑'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: ' ' with: ' <IMG SRC="tab.gif" ALT=" ">'. temp _ temp copyReplaceAll: ' ' with: ' <BR>'. ^ temp! !

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RE: Comments on Smalltalk block closure designs, part 1
by Allen Wirfs-Brock 03 May '01

03 May '01

At 03:24 PM 5/3/2001 +1200, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote: >Take a look at KaliScheme. Also take a look at http://www.smalltalksystems.com/publications/avmarch.pdf This presents a complete virtual machine architecture that includes support for closures. Much of the architecture is probably not very applicable to Squeak but the design of the activation records, environments, closures, and methods are reasonably well explained and many of the concepts should be adaptable to squeak. Allen

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Re: newbie: nice text file
by John Hinsley 03 May '01

03 May '01

"Richard A. O'Keefe" wrote: > > Jeff Shipman <shippy(a)nmt.edu> wrote: > Whenever I go to Yellow->More->Save Contents to file > the file that is produced has a bunch of ^M's > in it instead of carriage returns. > > ^M ***is*** carriage return. > > I'm using Squeak under Linux on an i686. > > Linux, like other Unix versions, does not use carriage returns. > Unix uses *linfe feed* characters (ASCII 10) to terminate lines. > > Squeak was initially developed on MacOS, which, unlike UNIX, > uses *carriage return* characters (ASCII 13) to terminate lines. > > Squeak source files (and a snippet out of a workspace counts as a > source file) are supposed to be byte-for-byte identical on all > supported systems, so the MacOS convention is always used for them. > > If Squeak wrote a file Foo using CR and you need a file Bar using LF, > just do > tr '\r' '\n' <Foo >Bar > > (Check 'man tr' first to ensure that your version of tr understands '\r' > and '\n'. You might have to use '\015' for CR and '\012' for LF instead.) Everything Richard writes is correct. I rather like the idea of sorting it in Squeak, but have yet to try out any of the suggestions. You might like to use this simple little bash script (called mac2unix after dos2unix). Just put it in your path (usr/local/bin is as good a place as any) and make it executable. It's not the most elegant script, but it works every time. Cheers John -- ****************************************************************************** Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?" Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft." ****************************************************************************** #mac2unix #by Isaac Sparrow #!/bin/bash echo "This script converts Mac text files to Unix It WILL overwrite the original file Please enter the name of the file you wish to work on" read file tr '\r' '\n' < $file > $file.NEW echo processing $file mv $file.NEW $file

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Re: German Squeak [was Squeak for 3-year-olds]
by Richard A. O'Keefe 03 May '01

03 May '01

Brent Pinkney <Brent.Pinkney(a)reuters.com> wrote: I always wondered why there are no known programming languages with non-English syntax. There were (at least) Chinese and French versions of Algol 60. I have seen one program written in Chinese Algol (all I could read was the numbers and punctuation marks) and a couple in French Algol. Technically, the same _could_ have been done for Algol 68; I don't know if it ever was. (There was a really _lovely_ introduction to programming, using Algol 68, in French. But it used the English keywords.) O'CAML has a pluggable preprocessor; I dare say you should produce a German version of CAML in a few minutes too. The original Prolog, Marseilles Prolog, used French words. The actual *structure* of Edinburgh Prolog is much closer to, say, Maaori, than it is to English. There are enough talented Indian programmers that I would expect there to be quite a few programming languages looking rather like one or another Indian language, but they wouldn't have much chance of becoming popular elsewhere.

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Squeak Foundation Suggestion
by Jochen F. Rick 03 May '01

03 May '01

It seems to me that the need for a Squeak Foundation version of Squeak is necessitated by the design style of Squeak. Right now, Squeak development seems to be concerned with the design of the large (vision and progress). If it is truelly to be useful and not just another version of Smalltalk, large changes will need to be made. But, you can't really get mega change from small improvements. So, you have to lose backwards compatibility for a hopefully visionary future. In contrast, what companies and first-time users are most interested in and critical about concerns the design of the small. Can I count on the code to work? Are individual methods well commented? Is MPEG support truelly cross-platform? etc. For these needs, a Squeak foundation version of Squeak might be necessary. As, such, I propose calling the Squeak foundation version "SmallSqueak". It hints at the design-of-the-small methodology. Also, it hints at the SmallTalk past. Peace and Luck! Je77

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Matrix class?
by Jeff Shipman 03 May '01

03 May '01

Is there a Matrix class available in Squeak? If so, where is it in the browser? Thanks. Jeff "Shippy" Shipman E-Mail: shippy(a)nmt.edu Computer Science Major ICQ: 1786493 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Homepage: http://www.nmt.edu/~shippy

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