From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2002-01-31T08:04:48+09:00
Subject: Re: IOWA error and question

Nathaniel writes:

>For instance, it appears that the key in the hash is "iowa::ul",
>while the key it is looking for is "ul".

Aha!  I bet the behavior of Class#name has changed.  Look at
Element.inherited -
if you change subclass.name.downcase to
subclass.name.split("::").downcase it should start working.

>It's good to hear that development is ongoing, and it seems like
porting
>from Squeak won't be extremely hard. I am curious, however, as to why
>you decided to switch to Squeak. Was it just a change in interest, or
>were there things you could do with it that Ruby wouldn't support?

There are a few things Squeak does that are nice for IOWA:
 - real iterative development.  As I think you found with Lapidary,
reloading a Ruby file in a running program is an imperfect solution. 
Smalltalk is much better at managing an evolving codebase on the fly. 
Those looking at IDEs might want to think about this...
 - solid cross-platform development environment
 - easier to hack runtime; I play some fun tricks in the new version
with backtracking, using what are more or less continuations but where
each invocation of the continuation runs in a separate stack.  This
was easy to add to Squeak, would be much harder to add to Ruby.

None of these are essential, but they were enough to make the switch
worthwhile. Ideally, of course, we would maintain both versions...

Avi