However, Classes and methods are Objects which have well defined tools
to help them migrating from an image to another, even to another
Smalltalk dialect. This ease code sharing.
This is less clear for arbitrary objects...
That's why I restrict myself to initialize these class vars in an
initialize method in the class side, and loose some of the power of the
image...
But there is a better reason:
if you construct your object with some snippets of code, say in an
inspector or a debugger:
MyTable at: 1 put: 30 degreesToRadians cos * 4
Then your image will loose the history of construction.
All it retains is 3.464101615137755 which is somehow less expressive.
Nicolas
Bert Freudenberg a écrit :
Seems you've made the first step to truly understanding Smalltalk :)
Also you must realize that the browser is just a view into that live
system of objects we call classes and is simply modifying those live
objects. You could do that in an inspector as well, but the class
browser is more specialized so it is easier to use for that purpose.
Welcome to Real Objects.
- Bert -
On Sep 4, 2007, at 12:19 , John Almberg wrote:
Whoa... that worked, but the implications are a bit hard to digest...
So MyClass is an object in my Smalltalk image, and it can have
variables that I can set interactively, and the values contained
therein are now part of the class...
I keep reading that classes are objects, but this is the first time
I've seen something that makes me realize that they are fundamentally
different than objects in other languages. I guess because they are
'live', in some sense, in the Smalltalk environment. That is, not just
source code, but an instantiated object.
Talk about paradigm whiplash... I'm going to have to think about this,
a bit :-)
Thanks!
-- John
Type "MyClass", select it, press Cmd-i (or Alt-i). You get an
inspector on a class - which of course is the instance of another
class, as everything is an object (and hence an instance of a class)
in Smalltalk. Anyway, you should see a reference to the superclass, a
dictionary of all the methods, the list of instance variables and
subclasses etc. Class variables are simply held in a Dictionary in
the "classPool" instance variable of that class. So by inspecting
that and drilling down into your class var you can modify it.
A simpler way to get at the contents of your class var is just
selecting its name in a browser showing any method of your class, and
press Cmd-i there. That works because in the browser, code is
evaluated in the context of the selected class.
- Bert -
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