[self-interest] GUI and console (was: data structures)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Jose' B. Garcia Perez-Schofield wrote:
>         It seems that Smalltalk had influented very much in the design of
> Self....

Someone once said (I would like to know who it was so I can quote
him properly...) that "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so".

Smalltalk is the name of a series of languages: Smalltalk-72,
Smalltalk-74, -78, and Smalltalk-80 which is what we now know
by that name. There were considerable differences between these
languages, and Self is much closer to the ANSI standard for Smalltalk
than, for example, Smalltalk-74 was. In fact, Self is the result of
an effort to create a Smalltalk-86. So I always present Self to
people as "a Smalltalk dialect" instead of a separate language.

>         By the way, what abaout the relation between the Self Console and
> the graphical environment. If I evaluate the expression '()' in the
> console, why the empty object doesn't appear onto the world ?
>         It seems that the graphical part is very far from textual forms....

All releases of Self prior to the 4.0 one were operated exclusively
from the console. You typed in an expression and got a result. The
last release introduced a complete graphical user interface, but
if you look at the sources this is really just another program that
you run from the console. It is special in that when you type

   desktop go

this expression never really returns but you get another prompt so
you can continue to use the console in parallel with the GUI. You
can, in fact, type an expression so that the result would appear
in the graphical interface, but it doesn't make much sense to do
so if you can get the same result much more easily by typing '()'
in a shell within the GUI itself.

-- Jecel


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