Re: [Help-smalltalk] Wireworld animated GIF renderer - also questions on style and distribution

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 12/06/2010 11:07 PM, John Morrice wrote:
> * Reads wireworld programs in the format described on the Rosetta
>    Code page.
> * Produces animated (pseudo) GIFs of the simulation, using libplot from
>    GNU Plotutils.

Nice!

> Inevitably I have questions:

That's good.

> * I have not parcelled my program as a package. I've read about
>    Smalltalk packages though, and I see that a package can depend on a
>    shared object being installed.
>    However, my program contains C code which is compiled to a shared
>    library and then loaded dynamically in Smalltalk.  I couldn't see
>    anything in the user manual which would suggest that C source can be
>    distributed as part of a package, and compiled on the user's machine.
>    Am I right or are there Smalltalk tools that help with this?
>    More broadly: am I doing it wrong?
>    What is the convention for dealing with this?

http://smalltalk.gnu.org/wiki/creating-and-distributing-packages

:)

Paolo

> * I'm used to choosing method and function names in Ruby,
>    Haskell and C that describe the intent of the function.  In
>    Smalltalk I'm finding this difficult because I need multiple
>    selector names, one: for each: parameter, so I have to choose multiple
>    selector names which together describe the intent.  I'm not sure
>    why, but I find this very difficult.  Any advice?

A common idea is to compose: verbs with: prepositions and: conjunctions.

Paolo