[Help-smalltalk] Paolo - thoughts on 2.1? (resend)

[MSA or SJF]

Apologies if this is a duplicate - Yahoo has been
playing up, so I don't know if the last send was
successful...

Paolo,

I've been thinking about some limitations of the
browser. I was just wondering if you are already
thinking about / working on similar things / solutions
(and whether I could contribute):

_Change_logs_ (and change sets)

The change log works fine from the prompt, (as far as
I know), but once you start up the browser, the code
doesn't pass through the same point in the code, so
the log falls silent.

There are (by my quick reckoning), four places (in
Behavious) where the browser makes a primitive
function call to compile code. I thought about hooking
a log file in there, and I thought about hooking a log
file into the C code, with some hooks back to the
Smalltalk system. I couldn't decide which was better,
although I lean towards keeping as much of the system
in Smalltalk as possible (and my C is very rusty, so I
am more able to do that). What do you think?

Having said all that, it would really be nicer to be
able to file out change sets, rather than logging
everything, but that is a more complicated exercise -
any thoughts on that?

There's also the STinST compiler to consider...

_Namespaces_

At the moment, the browser has various difficulties
with namespaces. For example, I find that to subclass
off a class in a non-Smalltalk namespace, I have to
copy the class template it a worksheet, and Doit, as
follows:

Namespace current: BLOX.BLOXBrowser.
"Class template copied in here"
Namespace current: Smalltalk.

Similarly, the Senders message only seems to return
senders in the Smalltalk namespace.

Both of these seem to come down to the fact that
(Namespace current) is Smalltalk, rather than the
currently selected Namespace in the browser. I don't
know what implications there are for simply changing
it beforehand.

If I am going to hack on either of these, it would be
useful to know how you think they should be done. You
might have fixed them already though - I'm using 2.0d.

Regards,

Mike Anderson

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