[self-interest] Transporter

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Thu Jun 13 22:17:06 UTC 2002


On Tuesday 11 June 2002 04:03, Thorsten Dittmar wrote:
> [permissions for safe programming instead of extra copying]
> How ever, it is like it is and the people who did it had good reasons
> for that, that for sure. A change at this part would be really hard
> and there are enough things that are more valuable for the community
> and even easier to do.

Self is an experimental system and has only been used by very 
experienced people who know how to avoid the pitfalls. Your suggestions 
would make the system more useful to "regular" programmers.

> Oh yes! And even future can come very fast ;-) That is the reason why
> I love systems with good do/undo functionalities and with a good
> versioning system. Jecel, don't you have a student who wants to
> implement do/undo/redo stuff in the editors ;-)

You would need to make modifications everywhere. Select "change colors" 
for a complex morph and it is very likely that you will be surprised 
with the result and might not like it. Unless you saved a snapshot just 
before doing this it is very, very hard to get things back the way they 
were.

The solution I prefer is to handle this in the virtual memory system 
instead of at the application level. And this should be done in a way 
that includes your suggestions about defensive programming.

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002 17:21:37 -0700 David Ungar wrote:
> The general problem of finding an ordering by trying to understand
> what code does (in this case an initialization message) turned out to
> be beyond me.

There is no solution (that code might have a 'perform:' or something 
equally opaque). But I just had the idea that if you compile the 
initialization code, any object included as a literal should be created 
before the current slot. This would handle Thorsten's case as well as 
the current global object initializers.

Note that we were discussing the problem of slot order within a single 
module, not between modules.

> PS: I bet that I won't be able to post this to the yahoo group.

It worked.

-- Jecel



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