On 04 Mar 2015, at 02:20, Jeff Gray <jeff@rogerthedog.com> wrote:

Hi all, Apologies if I've had my head in the sand but I see some posts in here about adding slots and I don't know what they are. How are these going to help me as an application programmer?

Yes, but we need to learn how to use them ourselves… The idea is that we ship Pharo4 with the Slot mechanism + Examples. Then in Pharo5, we will distill a library of useful Slots that then people can just use. Slots at first will be very important for the System programmer: to control how instances are stored in Memory. This will allow simpler designs (e.g. look at MorphExtension). Then certain slots will show to be very useful in general. For example the WeakSlot I am sure people will like, as it allows you to use weak state exactly how you thought it would work. Another example is a Slot that announces that it has been changed. This will be used a lot in UI level code. (see the experimental GLMPhlowSlot).

Is there an idiot's guide somewhere?

Not yet really… I want to first finish Slots+Reflectivity to that state as they should be for Pharo4, after I will write a tutorial. Marcus