Self-interest October 2000

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

16 participants
15 discussions

Blocks: Summary
by Dru Nelson 12 Jan '01

12 Jan '01

Thanks Jecel for the great Summary. The trick I was looking for was the read barrier when using blocks. Whenever they are about to be used as an argument for a message send, the 'push' instruction will bind a newly cloned block proto to the current method context (activation record). I was looking for something less expensive :) Dru Nelson San Mateo, California

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4.1.2 compatibility with 4.0
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 03 Nov '00

03 Nov '00

I have tracked down why my demos failed in Self 4.1.2 (yes - I should have tested this before the presentation....). 1) When I created the applications in Self 4.0, Mario's Smalltalk Emulator was loaded and since I had been programming in Smalltalk a lot at the time I ended up using messages like 'and:' and 'ifTrue:IfFalse:' that don't exist in plain Self. 2) The old menu creation code used something like 'label:fontName:fontSize:fontColor:' while Self 4.1.2 expects something like 'label:fontSpec:fontColor:'. 3) The bytecodes have changed significantly in Self 4.1.2! I don't know if this is due to the PEP project or an experiment with interpreting Self, but now there are 16 bytecodes instead of the previous 8. Fixing 1 (by loading the Smalltalk Emulator) and 2 allowed Albertina's ecoDesign CAD software to run. Fixing 3 would be a minor rewrite of tinySelf 1 since it would now have to understand the new bytecodes. This might also be a problem for other people implementing Self and intending to use a normal snapshot file for testing. -- Jecel

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presentation, legacy code, mango, method objects
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 29 Oct '00

29 Oct '00

Sorry to mix all these threads in one reply, but it was either this or nothing. On Friday we had the first SelFest event. Though there were no speakers besides me and the audience was only three graduate students, I feel it was a success. Next year will be better, of course, with a proper "call for papers" and stuff. I wrote a quick and dirty presentation software in Self. It just lets you drop "anchors" around in Kansas and then you can slide over to them one by one by pressing the space key. Richard asked about "legacy code". There is some good stuff (Mango, Dave's web browser, Mario's Smalltalk). Don asked about Mango and I can say that it works ok in Self 4.1.2 since I had to use it to load the Smalltalk Emulator (more below). Unfortunately, most of the code written for Self was for older versions and would have to be ported to run on the current one (my CMOS simulator, James Noble's Tarraingím, Nick Drew's 3D Object Browser, Ivan Moore's Guru (I think)). While the code for my simulator is available, it seems that the others are not. During my presentation, the two programs I tried to demonstrate (my tinySelf 1 and Albertina Lourenci's ecoDesign CAD) failed to run in Self 4.1.2. They run just fine in Self 4.0 and would be easy to fix to run on the latest version (use '&&' instead of 'and:' and things like that), but I wasn't going to do that in front of a live audience! Marko pointed out the real reason for staying compatible. In the early 1990s, there were lots of Self-like projects around the world. The most visible one was NewtonScript from Apple, but there were Kevo, Moostrap, NeoLogo and many others. Everyone liked the general idea of Self, but thought they could make it smaller or better in some aspect. This lack of focus led to a lot of dead projects, just like what happened with OSes a decade before. In the late 1990s there were (are) lots of Self-clone projects: tinySelf, JSelf, mySelf, OpenSelf and others. This is also like the Unix-clone days of one decade before - the effort was still being spread around but at least code can be shared. I don't think we need to "freeze" Self on account of old code. If we can make it better (to me that means simpler), then let us not hesitate to do so! But we are such a tiny community already - it would be a very bad idea for us to go in separate directions. It is important to note that many of the things now being discussed have been discussed before. Very few people in this list were around back in 1992 or whenever these things were being debated. Self has stood the test of time, just as Unix among OSes. Please continue to bring up these points and let's think hard about them, but don't forget to give David and Randy the benefit of the doubt given that they have worked on this for 14 years. In particular: I would love nothing more than to unify methods and blocks, or assignment and parameter passing. I am just waiting for somebody to figure out how to do it. Back to Mango: I think it is just great, but I don't see why your "structured grammar" has first to be translated into a traditional one before it can be interpreted. It seems to be that this makes the system much more complex than it has to be (you have to understand errors in terms of the translated grammar, not your original one). It is interesting that the last example in the Tarraingím site is a graphical parser generator (see http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/~kjx/parse.html). Back to method objects: since I came from a Lisp background to Smalltalk, I was at first frustrated that you couldn't easily manipulate code. So I created a Smalltalk where you could do this (see http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/st84.txt). As time went by I found out that I would never use this except when creating the programming environment itself (which is really meta-programming, not "normal" programming). Which I think is David's point: if there is something only a few people want to do, you shouldn't make it easy to do by accident in the name of consistency. -- Jecel

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Method are not objects?
by Marko Mikulicic 29 Oct '00

29 Oct '00

Hello, In the last few days I played with Self4 on a sparc machine and found some strange things: VM# ( | a | 'ciao' ) 'ciao' <3>: ( | parent* = <4>. | byte array: {99, 105, 97, 111} ) it seems that the parser does not parse this construct as an "object with code", but instead it evaluates it, forgetting the "| a |" . This behaviour is not consistent with ( | m = ( | a | 'ciao' ) | ) where it is parsed as a method (object with code). I know that mirrors are used to handle methods but this why not allow creating method literals ? Marko

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Mango
by Don Hopkins 28 Oct '00

28 Oct '00

Several years ago, I read a paper about a parser written in Self called Mango. Are there any more papers about Mango, or has any other research or development been done along those lines? It was a parser that created parse trees of nodes that dynamically inherited application specific behaviors. It solved the problem that people have with using XML through the DOM, since when you parse in a DOM tree, the nodes are all generic xml nodes, instead of domain specific classes, so the code you have to write to manipulate them is much more verbose, harder to follow, and less type safe, since it's going through the generic DOM interface, instead of an application defined interfaces appropriate for the particular nodes. Mango parsed in trees and made each node inherit from an application defined class, which is a very selfish thing to do, so I haven't seen the technique used in other systems based on languages like C++, that can't easily morph object inheritance aroud willy nilly like self. But it might be doable in Python. Some DOM-like interfaces have user data pointers on each of the nodes, that can point to "bicameral" application defined objects, but that's quite clumsy compared to the Mango approach. I would be interested in learning what eventually became of Mango, and about other parsers like that, implemented in any language. Thanks for any info! -Don

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self on linux
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr 26 Oct '00

26 Oct '00

Tomorrow I'll give the Linux port another shot (having 20 students share a Sparcstation 20 does that to a guy...). Any words of advice? -- Jecel

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Mixed Environment
by Dan Rozenfarb 20 Oct '00

20 Oct '00

Hello, I am Dan Rozenfarb from Argentina. In my master thesis work I have implemented Self-like objects in Squeak with the purpose of having an environment with class-based and class-less object mixed. It is supposed to allow exploratory and incremental programming, letting you evolute from class-less objects towards a more (mature?) arrangment with hierarchies of classes. In writing the "related work" section I looked for others environments for comparison purposes and found no one. Do you know of any language/environment which combines those features? I will really appreciate all the information you may share Thanks

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Problem running Self4.1.2 UI on sparc
by Marko Mikulicic 12 Oct '00

12 Oct '00

Hello, I finally installed Self 4.1.2 and was very excited when I saw the command line. I cannot use the snapshot because I have a quota of 10M soft, 20M hard, so I installed the executabile and the ui1 ui2 core glue subdirectories filled with the sources. I runned 'smallUI2.self' _RunScript and after a long long time I got: [...] eading ./ui2/outliner/syntaxErrorMorph.self... reading ./ui2/outliner/debuggerMorph.self... reading ./ui2/outliner/structureEditing.self... Starting: Collecting Garbage... Finished: Collecting Garbage Starting: Refilling module cache... Finished: Refilling module cache couldn't transfer to process <4> (suspended): primitiveFailedError couldn't transfer to process <5> (suspended): primitiveFailedError couldn't transfer to process <6> (suspended): primitiveFailedError couldn't transfer to process <7> (suspended): primitiveFailedError couldn't transfer to process <8> (suspended): primitiveFailedError couldn't transfer to process <9> (suspended): primitiveFailedError #0 (./core/scheduler.self:1110): value = [ "This is not a scheduled process--either it's the scheduler itself or the scheduler isn't running. p = schedulerProcess = _ThisProcess" p _PrintProcessStack. errorLevel: 0. p causeOfError reportError: p ForceStackTrace: false. p _AbortProcess. ^ self. "won't actually reach here" ] #1 (./core/boolean.self:168): ifTrue:False: = ( | self* = true. :b1 = <10>. :b2 = nil. | b1 va lue ) #2 (./core/boolean.self:235): ifTrue: = ( | self* = true. :b = <10>. | ifTrue: b False: nil ) [....] Error: should not suspend scheduler. Receiver is: scheduler. VM# then I ran desktop open and an empty window named "Self 1" opened on my (dialup remote, 24-bit) display but It didn't respond to any mouse input and remains white. I tried "desktop inspect: lobby" but nothing happened. desktop close closed the window. When I issue: VM# scheduler printProcessQueues I get Ready: <150> ready process: UI2 step timeout process >>> No 'opens' slot found in <151> ready process: UI2 stepWatcher >>> No 'opens' slot found in desktop. <152> ready process: UI2 stepProcess >>> No 'opens' slot found in desktop. <153> ready process: UI2 runLoop >>> No 'opens' slot found in desktop. is this OK? I run on SunOS 5.6. Please help, trying to hack on somethink you don't know over a modem connection on a server with currently logged 30 people (at 3am, during the day the root kills without regret every one who is running a 50M app with 20M rss) its very frustrating Thanks in advance Marko

3 6

Slot initializers
by Marko Mikulicic 11 Oct '00

11 Oct '00

Hello, There are a couple of things in the Self syntax wich I though they was clear to me but after trying them out in JSelf I got confused. (|john=jim.aSlot=something|) is this the same as ( | john=(jim.aSlot = something) | ) , where jim is a parent in the lobby or: (|john=jim . aSlot=something|) Thank you Marko

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Re: [self-interest] Re: Self-Stamtisch? + Self on Mac
by vincent.coetzee＠rmb.co.za 09 Oct '00

09 Oct '00

Hi Dave When you talk of carbonising Self, do you just mean updating the appropriate API calls to work under Carbon (such as memory, core os support etc), or are there some more radical changes involved. I would love to help, but right now am snowed under at work, should be calmer in a month or so, and then perhaps could contrinute some time. Vince Vincent Coetzee Technology - eBucks.com Telephone: +27 11 282 8952 Facsimile: +27 11 282 4717 David Ungar <David.Ungar@En To: self-interest(a)egroups.com g.Sun.COM> cc: Subject: Re: [self-interest] Re: 06/10/2000 Self-Stamtisch? + Self on Mac 10:34 Please respond to self-interest Sekhar, Where are you? Are you actually at Berkeley? - Dave >Thorsten Dittmar writes: >> is anybody interesting in a Self Stammtisch at OOPSLA? > >Definately! > >So... i've tried running Self in the OS X Beta and bad things start >happening. I've got the Carbon Dater report for the Self VM and i'm >looking into carbonizing the VM. > >Is anyone else working on this? If so, maybe we should talk... > >- sekhar > >-- >C. Ramakrishnan cramakrishnan(a)acm.org -- David Ungar Sun Microsystems Laboratories (650) 336-2618

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Self-interest October 2000