On 6/21/05, Stefan Urbanek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello, > > I am preparing a specification for Actors for StepTalk. Actors are going to > push > scripting to higher level and will allow creation of custom objects. Besides > other things they can be used for fast application prototyping as started by > Nicolas Roard using Gorm. > > I am looking for a helping hand for implementing it. > > What needs to be done (briefly): > > Actor class > - actor is an object with methods written in any StepTalk supported language > (pure C functions would be possible too) > - it looks like STScriptObject (see > StepTalk/Frameworks/StepTalk/STScriptObject.[hm]) > > Traits (delegation mechanism) > - inspriation comes from Sun's Self language, however it is not exactly the > very > same thing > - traits are like super in ObjectiveC/Smalltalk, they allow kind of > inheritance > or delegation; one actor can have more traits (more delegates) > - dictionary of traits for the actor > - forwarding to traits/delegates when no actor method is found > > If you would like to help, you do not need to know StepTalk. I will guide you > and you will learn something. Just drop me an email.
Stefan, I have currently something working here, as I told you -- eg I can define classes, and inheritance is done. As what you propose seems very close to what I have, I'd like to include it in ST :-) At the moment, my implementation just execute a script in a (local) STEnvironment. There's perhaps faster way to do it (your recent modification of taking a dictionary as parameter), but it doesn't change much of the rest of the design -- eg, as long as you have some code that takes a script and can execute it with variables... Or perhaps the difference with what I do and what you want to do is that I manage the whole object model instead of delegating it to the script languages ? What I'd like to do is to try to create a smalltalk-like environment/IDE -- possibly included in Gorm via palettes/bundles, or standalone. For the moment, just a simple classes/instances system, with inheritance, classes and instances variables, in short, very similar to smalltalk. I'm actually adding automatic setter/getter, and adding traits wouldn't be difficult at all. About the traits, if I remember one of stéphane's paper, one nice idea was that the traits could define a list of methods the object must answers in order to have the traits working... I need to reread it, but i'd like to implement it that way (so you could have a visual indication in the IDE that the traits is properly "connected" to the object or not). Cheers, -- Nicolas Roard "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
