The Weekly Pheromone Volume II, Issue 3

[glen e. p. ropella]

                         The Weekly Pheromone
                          Volume 2, Issue 3
                          March 05, 1997


   The Pheromone will stand to inform users of the activities and
goals of the hive and user community.  Contributions are accepted that
announce Swarm-related events or activities in any of the growing
Swarm colonies around the world.  To contribute, send e-mail to
address@hidden  The Pheromone is mailed out on Tuesday (or....
maybe Wednesday) if and only if there is information to be
disseminated.

Table of Contents
-----------------

   I.  Swarm 1.0.1 & SwarmDocs 1.0.2

========================================================================

   I.  Swarm 1.0.1 & SwarmDocs 1.0.2

   Swarm 1.0.1 has been released.  I've put the description of 
the changes made on the web at:

http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/release.html#changes

Here's a copy of that text:

    o Added different colored lines in EZGraph. This just means that any series
      added to an EZGraph will pick the next color out of a list of 10 colors,
      after which the colors cycle. 

    o EZBin Tcl/Tk fixed. EZBin experienced some problems in the 1.0.0 release
      where the second time the mouse was moved into the focus of the
      window, a Tcl/Tk error was generated. This was due to the "%" character
      being wrongly interpreted by the fprintf function in libtclobjc. JJ fixed
      this by prepending "%W" with another "%". 

    o ProbeDisplay notification. The generic object reference capability added
      in the 1.0.0 release allows any object one or more references to objects
      whose existence or behavior depends on it. This mechanism was used to
      destroy any ProbeDisplays that refer to an object when that object is
      dropped. Hence, where before, if an object was dropped prior to the
      dropping of the displays attached to it, Swarm would crash, now, the
      object politely notifies the display that it is being dropped, at which
      point the display drops itself. 

    o Tk raster refresh fix. A change in the way Tcl/Tk 7.5/4.1 handled the
      background redraw of a raster widget was different than the way it was
      handled in 7.4/4.0. This broke the way Swarm's tkobjc used the raster
      widget. It, effectively, caused the background refresh to draw over the
      foreground of the raster. Barry removed the background flag from the
      widget command and, thereby, fixed the problem. 

    o Added custom probemap create method. A new class was added to the
      ProbeMap class hierarchy called CustomProbeMap. This subclass
      overrides the ProbeMap's createEnd method in the same way the other
      subclasses do. But, it also provides a special create: aZone forClass:
      (Class) aClass withIdentifiers: (char *) vars, ... variable argument
      number class method. This method allows one to create the probemap
      and set all the variables and messages to be probed in one message. Usage
      is documented in the swarmobject library documentation. 

      Also, the CustomProbeMap class replaces the EmptyProbeMap class
      present in previous releases. However, EmptyProbeMap can still be used,
      but, will disappear in some later release. 

    o Change in default probemap behavior. In version 1.0.0, if a
      createProbeDisplayFor: was called and no probemap had been assigned
      for the class of the object being probed, then a CompleteProbeMap was
      created for use by the ProbeDisplay. Now, however, a ProbeMap is only
      created for the instance variables of the class as default. 

      This change precipitated an addition to the swarmobject library interface.
      The isProbeMapDefinedFor: (Class) aClass message has been added to
      the ProbeLibrary class to return True if there exists a ProbeMap for that
      class and False otherwise. 

    o Removed printfs from random. There were a few stray debugging print
      statements left in the random library code. These have been removed. 


                              =========

The Swarm Bulletin is created by the members of the Swarm project at
the Santa Fe Institute.  For more information on the Swarm Project,
see http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm.  Comments, corrections, and
contributions should be sent to address@hidden