Bijan Parsia :
Duane Maxwell wrote:
[snip]
Hey! I resent that! An Apple ][ emulator is *supremely* useless.
In fact, I challenge anyone to come up with something else in Squeak less useful.
Ok, I have a few IRC goodies:
1) MorseIRC. Translates all incoming and outgoing messages to morse code. 2) Er...I don't have a name for this, but ...
Now, now. We might continue this list for years. ZX81 emulators (they exist, sure, see the pages of XTender...). A program which computes the mileage of your mouse, all kind of silly text scramblers, etc. I could give you some hundreds of such "goodies". So why do I bother you with that? Because ALL COMP. SCI TEACHERS in this best of worlds are *obliged* to produce either directly, or through their students such wonderful pieces of software. Their purpose may be just training. We teach compilation and virtual machines. Well, now, be more ambitious, and do something which works, even if it is silly. Now I have two students who code Lindenmayer systems in Squeak. Perfectly useless as well. But 1. They will learn Smalltalk. 2. They will learn how to process quasi-paralelly a highly recursive data structure.
So, I could even defend the ZX81 emulator, which has inside the Sinclair floating-point calculator, whose architecture is a decently optimized stack-based virtual machine, interesting. Etcaetera.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk Caen, France