I thought about the issue of directly referencing inspected objects from somewhere else as well. I would simply imagine that you can drag and drop a reference into the sources and it will work there as a normal global variable (essentially what you do). However that needs still quite some other infrastructure to be ready ;) namely all the source editors have to work directly on ast nodes. Additionally I guess there should be a way to properly put inline visual hints that the variable is a global reference :) On 2013-04-07, at 07:02, Ben Coman <btc@openInWorld.com> wrote:

Not sure what is possible with the work on the new debugger, but here is an idea / use case of mine...

In Pharo 1.4, from the debugger I Explore (ie using Glamourous Inspector) a temporary variable (debugvar1) that is collection. After drilling in a little bit to a particular model object, I want to call a method (#someCalcWith:) on that object that requires a second temporary variable (debugvar2) from the debugger. At the moment from the debugger I resort to (Smalltalk at: #mydebug put: debugvar2) and then in GI going (self someCalcWith: (Smalltalk at: #mydebug)). It would be nice if an Explore from a debugger took with it the current context so that those variables could be referred to by name from the GI. As a stretch, perhaps even if the debugger moves its position on the stack, then the context available to the GI would change to match.

cheers -ben