Squeak-dev October 2002

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183 participants
406 discussions

ThingLab Won't Filein
by Mark4Flies＠aol.com 05 Dec '02

05 Dec '02

I posted this message on September 28: "I am trying to use the ThingLab but I cannot get past installing it. I downloaded ThingLab v2 today. I am running Squeak 3.2.7 beta 6 (Carbon) updated to 4956 under Mac OS X 10.2.1 on an iMac. I open a new MVC project and file in the Predefs.cs without any trouble at all. As soon as I try to file in the other part, I get the message: < You may not create any more undefined objects - use nil. >" No one offered any ideas. I have confirmed the same problem under Windows 2000. If you know some thing about this software, please let me know if you have any suggestions. MUCH appreciated! -Mark

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Squeak MOO
by Eric Scharff 16 Nov '02

16 Nov '02

I have vague memories of someone doing a MOO project in Squeak, but the only match I could find in the Swiki was to SIMS, which seems to be more of a human simulation framework than a classic "telnet-based text-based client-server end-users-can-remotely-script-new-objects" MOO. Does such a thing exist currently in Squeak? The reason I ask is because I'm toying with end-user world creation, and I'm looking for examples. Wonderland seems to be one of the best within-squeak examples. I apologize for the vagueness of the request, but it is hard to find quite the right words to describe what I'm after. The key goals seem to be a shared virtual "world" emphasizing the end-user creation and modification of that world. For those of you unfamiliar with MOOs, think about Ultima Online or EverQuest but with considerable more control by the players over the dynamics of the world. I'm somewhat familiar with the research literature, but what I'm really after is architectural inspiration. Research reports tend to be good sociologically about how people use online worlds, but never talk about (important) implementation details or end-user-language-design issues. I have some ideas about architectures, but want to be serious about scalability and extensibility from the ground up (really large worlds, potentially large numbers of users, extremely expressive but still easy to learn and fast modification system, etc.) I'm looking for existing architectures to steal, erm, I mean be inspired by. :) -Eric

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[ANN] AspectS (0.4.4) & PerspectiveS (0.1.3)
by Robert Hirschfeld 12 Nov '02

12 Nov '02

There are updated version of AspectS (0.4.4) at http://www.prakinf.tu-ilmenau.de/~hirsch/Projects/Squeak/AspectS/ and of PerspectiveS (0.1.3) at http://www.prakinf.tu-ilmenau.de/~hirsch/Projects/Squeak/PerspectiveS/ Workspaces for both AspectS and PerspectiveS are attached. Best, -Robert

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SMInstaller (was re: [ANN] Seaside 2.02)
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 08 Nov '02

08 Nov '02

That's the main problem I'd like to solve by having install be one registered service of many that can handle packages. The design would allow the user to choose the tool he wants, and have many installers active for the same package. Daniel Avi Bryant <avi(a)beta4.com> wrote: > > On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 goran.hultgren(a)bluefish.se wrote: > > > > (I don't necessarily recommend updating through SqueakMap, though - better > > > would be to file it in clean to a new image. Need to get that > > > SMDVSInstaller going...) > > > > Exactly! :-) > > Looking at that again, I remembered what my other problem was with > #canInstall:, that I forgot to mention in my last post - since DVS files > are just .st, they get snapped up by the default installer before the DVS > installer ever gets a chance... > > What I've done before in similar situations is to do a leaf-first search, > so that subclassing an existing installer (and adding narrower criteria) > is feasible. > > I propose the following change to SMInstaller class: > > classForPackage: aPackage > "Find the most specialized subclass that wants to handle the package." > > self subclasses do: > [:ea | > (ea classForPackage: aPackage) > ifNotNilDo: [:class | ^ class]]. > > ^ (self canInstall: aPackage) ifTrue: [self]

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[ENH] Image Browser: for browsing code in the other .image file
by Yoshiki.Ohshima＠acm.org 08 Nov '02

08 Nov '02

Hello, Are you getting tired to create unnecessary file outs when all you want to do is to take a look at the code in another image and to see the diffs? Here is what you can do. * File in the attachment, * Open a FileList, * Select a .image file and choose 'browse in ImageBrowser' from the FileList menu, * Open the menu at the class pane of the ImageBrowser, * Choose 'add classes to list' and type the name of classes yo want to see. From a help from InterpreterSimulator, the ImageBrowser reads the source pointers stored in the CompiledMethods in the image file, and get the code from its accompanying .change file. (All file operations are done in 'read only mode'. So, don't worry about breaking your image file.) The convenient functions inherited from FileContentsBrowser, such as 'remove unmodified categories' are there, too. ImageBrowser works for M17n images as well. I happened to notice the recent discussion about 'Diff between two change sets'. This ImageBrowser helps you to get diff between two images:-) Hooking up the internal machinary of this one with Bob's Comparison Browser would be interesting, (although I couldn't find an image to test it.) Let me know any suggestions and comments, -- Yoshiki P.S. My email address has changed.

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LanguageAgnostic Runtimes'02
by PhiHo Hoang 05 Nov '02

05 Nov '02

Hi, Does anyone know who will be speaking about Squeak VM at this event ? http://hosting.msugs.ch/auroraborealis/Workshops/LAR02/LAR02Home.htm <Quote> While the problem domain is restricted to addressing kernel requirement issues, experience reports from researchers targeting alternative dynamic languages and component models to the JVM, Squeak VM, CLI, or other virtual machine architectures are also welcome. </Quote> Cheers, PhiHo.

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Re: arbitrary precision floats?
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 04 Nov '02

04 Nov '02

What does that mean? how do you represent irrational numbers? or is that arbitrary as in user specified, as different from infinite? Michael Vanier <mvanier(a)cs.caltech.edu> wrote: > > Has anyone implemented code for arbitrary precision floating-point numbers > in squeak? > > Mike

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DVS and lfs
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 04 Nov '02

04 Nov '02

Hi Avi, all. Well, filing out using DVS adds lf to my line endings. Avi, you said before that this comes from working with CVS, which requires it. Is there some way us non-CVS users can avoid this, hmm, feature? ;-) Maybe a PackageInfo subclass for CVS users (that minority that includes the DVS author - yes I know that's pretty damn cheeky)? or something? Daniel

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RE: An uncomfortable question
by Swan, Dean 02 Nov '02

02 Nov '02

What 3.3a is trying to do with modules is essentially opening the same can of worms that has made MS Windows such a maintenance nightmare. Modules are (more or less) equivalent to .DLLs and may end up with all the associated issues. I don't know of any "good" solutions to these problems, but as attractive as the "idea" of modules is, I am personally content to stick with monolithic images for the forseeable future. The whole concept of "software components" is IMO a fantasy propagated by media hype that ignores all the realities of real world engineering. In "real" hardware product designs, one often finds that re-usability is more of a structuring concept than a hard reality. I don't believe I've ever worked on a hardware design that didn't involve some kind of custom connector that is a "slight" variation of a "standard" connector, for example. (Just for context, I'm referring to everything I've worked on in the last 12 years or so). I think the concept of a monolithic image constrains the reusability myth to realistic proportions, and makes implementation possible. Too much flexibility comes at a cost, which usually rears its ugly head in the form of increased complexity, higher resource requirements, and reduced preformance (relative to a less flexible implementation). As an example of what I'm talking about, I've worked on a couple of different projects in the last few years where the end product has similar capabilities but one was implemented using a "flexible, reusable platform approach" and the other was implemented using a more task specific approach. The flexible system has a source tree for the "platform" of about 5 gigabytes, generates a target image of about 170 megabytes, and needs two 300 MHz PowerPC 603e's and 512M of RAM to run. This system has hundreds of developers working on it. The "task specific" system has a source tree of about 300 megabytes, generates a target image of about 1 megabyte, and runs on one 66 MHz PowerPC with 16M of RAM. This system had 4 developers working on it. The end functionalities of these two systems is *very* similar. I'm not sure what my point is in all of this, but I think we should consider our goals carefully in relation to the questions that Andrew has raised. My preference is towards "lean and mean" rather than "incredibly flexible, general purpose (and suboptimal)". -Dean Swan -----Original Message----- From: Les Tyrrell [mailto:tyrrell@canis.uiuc.edu] Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 8:15 PM To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: An uncomfortable question These are important points- as we move forward, I am hoping that we will be moving towards a model in which individual pieces of code are liberated as much as possible from unneccessary constraints on their usage. That is going to require a rather significant change in a lot of Squeak's infrastructure, but I am rather impressed with how much progess is being made by a lot of people in terms of understanding those issues, or at least recognizing them. The days of the monolithic image ( and the inherent weaknesses and roadblocks to progress that it represents ) are, hopefully, numbered. - les ----- Original Message ----- From: <danielv(a)netvision.net.il> To: <squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org> Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 3:41 PM Subject: Re: An uncomfortable question > Well, I think something interesting is happening in SqueakMap. The count > is now up to 16 packages, by 8 different authors. These range from small > framework additions like SharedStreams to large projects that would be > unlikely to ever become available through the Squeak base image, like > Seaside. > > This opens up directly possibilities to maintain other projects outside > the image too, like Celeste, Scamper and others. > > All this should reduce the maintainance effort required of SqC, and let > the community do experiments in various directions without actually > requiring a fork. > > A case in point - if Henrik's code was first debuted as a SM package, it > would have gotten earlier feedback, it could have been more modular, it > would have been easier for people to try out and it would have been > optional, orthogonal to the harvesting work done on 3.3a. > > This would have saved us at least one uncomfortable question. > > So I think one important thing to consider is how we take full advantage > of this new option we have as a community, and how we change our process > to fit it in.

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[Modules] mailing list and activities
by danielv＠netvision.net.il 02 Nov '02

02 Nov '02

For those who got to wondering about that strange quietness in module land - About a week ago I tried to compile a shopping list of stuff we still need to make modules. I mailed some people that had shown some sort of interest. Anyway, this became a fast and furious discussion, that became a mailing list at sqmodules(a)lists.advantive.com, courtesy of Stephen Pair. I thought this was a good time to announce it here, because some people were asking questions. So anyone seriously interested in module, and not minding the smoke, sparks and rough edges of really raw code is invited to join. A bit about what's going on - Andreas Raab has convinced us that it'd be better to move to strong modules now, mostly in order to simplify the code and the mental model of how things should work. This requires some major changes to the tool set, and he's just released a first version of a module aware browser. This includes nice support for automatically keeping track of dependencies. Stephen Pair and I thought up a nice and simple way of passing around the names of modules for people to load - just make it a Url. Select something like loadmodule:/People/dvf/GraphAlgorithms in any text pane, bring up the menu, url-it, and that's it, you have a module. I'll post that here soon. Stephen Pair's selectors spaces are also a hot topic of discussion, and he's been refining the ideas and working out an implementation, to help round out modules later. If you want more detail, and especially if you're already working on modules (CraigL, Torge,you there?) you're welcome to read the archives and join us there. Note that traffic's been somewhat heavy lately. Of course whenever something's ready for prime time, things will be presented here. The original reason for the separate discussion was that modules were not popular and not easily popularized. When modules become a little more mainstream, the discussion should probably return to squeak-dev. Daniel

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