[Help-smalltalk] some simple (hopefully!) visualgst ideas

[Paolo Bonzini]

All,

looks like visualgst is healthy and is introducing some interesting 
improvements to Smalltalk browsing:

- sidebar sender/implementor
- compilation errors in an infobar
- tabbed browsing

Here are some more ideas to improve VisualGST with respect to this points:

1) finish the transition to BrowserState objects by:
- adding ContextState for the debugger
- adding #state: to the browsers replacing the complicated #select... 
methods; setting a state automatically updates the listboxes
- rationale: this should simplify fixing 
http://smalltalk.gnu.org/project/issue/505 by reverting to the previous 
state upon a compilation error

2) merge the two notebooks
- rationale: the required refactoring will ultimately make it easier to 
provide pluggable tools (e.g. sunit browser within GtkLauncher) and 
multiple GtkLaunchers

3) improve RBParser to provide fine-grained Exception objects; calling 
the parse error block should simply be the default action of the exceptions
- rationale: fine grained exceptions are an easy way to customize the 
compilation error infobar and provide squeak's "declare undefined 
variable as..." functionality
- could also be used for incremental parsing. making an incomplete but 
valid parse tree can help autocompletion

Paolo