New alpha image & VM up

Brian T. Rice water at tunes.org
Sun Aug 15 21:41:16 PDT 2004


As always, they are available at: http://slate.tunes.org/downloads/alpha/

I've made some systematic changes to handle an overdue method refactoring.

The boolean methods and: and or: have been renamed to /\ and \/ 
respectively, and all libraries in the core system and Mobius have been 
refactored to use them. Essentially, these are overridings for methods 
in the second argument.

The benefit of this is that AND/OR operations in Slate can be uniform 
without requiring the added keyword bagged of and:/or: (mostly in terms 
of parentheses and keyboard strokes). The downside is of course that 
it's easier to read "and" and "or" in "and:" and "or:". In the future, 
we may be able to elide the syntactic inconvenience of using relatively 
unfamiliar symbols using code-editing and display frameworks (probably 
in combination with Unicode symbols if we have an easy coding system for 
it). This is kind of a weak promise, but & and | from Smalltalk are 
inappropriate for Slate.

I have uploaded VM sources generated with the additional StringProto and 
ByteArrayProto linking points that Attila added. They're not quite of 
use yet, but this may change shortly and I wanted that to be available.

I've also added a utility in src/mobius/image.slate which allows for a 
wrapper around saveImageNamed:. The method "_ at Image save &name:" uses an 
Oddball named Image to store the image's filename as a default save 
option, and as a wrapper can do some simple things like raise a 
condition if there's an existing file that you may need to overwrite.

What's coming up for the next alpha image is probably the REPL usability 
enhancements, which I am working on.

The major project for the core right now is concurrency support, which I 
am still doing some final bits of research on and have some code I'm 
working with. The obstacle in this is determining what naturally fits 
into Slate's idiom, and what we want it to feel like afterward. I may 
write more on this later, since whatever final choices are made, they 
will certainly need explaining.
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