From: ntalbott@...
Date: 2002-01-31T11:20:13+09:00
Subject: RE: IOWA error and question

Avi Bryant [mailto:avi@beta4.com] wrote:

> 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.

Perzactly! I had to change it to
subclass.name.split("::").last.downcase, but it works great now. Thanks
for the help!


> >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...

Hear, hear!


>  - 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.

That makes sense... I've wanted to mess with Squeak, but I haven't yet
spent the focused time I need to get productive in it. There are
definitely things Ruby can learn from it, as others here have noted many
times.


> Ideally, of course, we would maintain both versions...

That's my hope... I'm sure someone with the necessary time and energy
will step up to the plate before too long. IOWA is to compelling for it
to sit dormant for long, especially with a polished Smalltalk version to
work from.

Thanks,


Nathaniel

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