Peter, Welcome aboard! IMHO, this is a fine place for the discussion that will hopefully result.
Two links that I find useful are: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.pharo.devel http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.general as they allow searching of the lists. Have you downloaded Pharo by Example? You might also want to get a print copy from Lulu. Learning your way around the Monticello GUI will be important. It has some quirks that I discovered the hard way; they should live in the pharo-dev archive above. In short, class categories/package names are case-sensitive, but you might have to remove the working copy of a package that somehow (your fault or not) picked up an undesired capitalization, e.g. ThisORThat vs. ThisOrThat before you can create the one you want. Method categoris (ab)used to package methods (*packageNameGoesHere) are apparently not case-sensitive. That's about all the damage I have time to do at the moment. What brings you to Pharo? We're glad to have you, but your thoughts on the system, what it does well, and what needs to improve could be helpful. Bill ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter Hugosson-Miller Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 11:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Pharo-project] Hints and clues for a Pharo newb Hi all, So it's time for me to stop lurking and do some stuff. However, although I am an experienced Smalltalk programmer (VisualAge Smalltalk continuously since 1995), I am a complete newb when it comes to Pharo and Squeak, it's hard to find my way around, and it's going to take me some time to get up to speed. I'm working on a small improvement to the testing framework, using ideas that I have found to be very useful in my daily job over the past 15 years. Note that I am doing this from scratch, so that I don't accidentally steal anything that I've done in my work, but I know how it all works in VisualAge, so I feel sure that I'll eventually be able to find the corresponding classes and methods in Pharo. What I would like are a few hints, clues and nudges in the right direction for scenarios and questions that I will describe in this thread. What I *don't* want are full-blown solutions, because then I won't learn anything. I hope that some kind souls will be able to give me a little help in the beginning that will eventually bring me up to speed and let me be productive. So to start with, one scenario and one question: 1) I want to find or write a method on Process that will print a stack trace onto a supplied Stream. Ideally I'd like to be able to decide the start and stop depth of the trace, so for example if I know that the top 4 stack frames will always be uninteresting, I would want to be able to write something like this: Processor activeProcess printStackFrom: 5 to: 15 on: aStream. 2) What *exactly* is "thisContext"? It appears to be a reserved word in Pharo, just like the familiar "self", "super", "true", "false", "nil" that are always reserved in Smalltalk. I'd also like to get an idea of what it's good for, and if anyone can describe it in terms of something that is in VisualAge, that would be nice too :-) BTW, if this is not the appropriate place for a thread like this, then please tell me where I should put it (politely, of course :-p) -- Cheers, Peter
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