April 2020 - Pharo-users - lists.pharo.org

Re: [Pharo-users] [Pharo-dev] Cover for PBE8

by Tim Mackinnon

Not an artist, and shamefully ripping off Nicolas, but how about something future lookingâ¦ > On 7 Apr 2020, at 11:21, Nicolas Anquetil <nicolas.anquetil(a)inria.fr> wrote: > > > :-) > > > > > On Tue, 2020-04-07 at 09:45 +0200, StÃ©phane Ducasse wrote: >> Hello >> >> We are working on PBE80 and we are looking for a new cool cover. >> If you think that you can do this we are all ears. >> >> S >> -------------------------------------------- >> StÃ©phane Ducasse >> http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org >> 03 59 35 87 52 >> Assistant: Julie Jonas >> FAX 03 59 57 78 50 >> TEL 03 59 35 86 16 >> S. Ducasse - Inria >> 40, avenue Halley, >> Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, BÃ¢t.A, Park Plaza >> Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650 >> France >> > -- > Nicolas Anquetil > RMod team -- Inria Lille > <pbe.png>

April 7, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] [Pharo-dev] Cover for PBE8

by Sven Van Caekenberghe

Not bad at all, made me smile. > On 7 Apr 2020, at 12:21, Nicolas Anquetil <nicolas.anquetil(a)inria.fr> wrote: > > > :-) > > > > > On Tue, 2020-04-07 at 09:45 +0200, StÃ©phane Ducasse wrote: >> Hello >> >> We are working on PBE80 and we are looking for a new cool cover. >> If you think that you can do this we are all ears. >> >> S >> -------------------------------------------- >> StÃ©phane Ducasse >> http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org >> 03 59 35 87 52 >> Assistant: Julie Jonas >> FAX 03 59 57 78 50 >> TEL 03 59 35 86 16 >> S. Ducasse - Inria >> 40, avenue Halley, >> Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, BÃ¢t.A, Park Plaza >> Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650 >> France >> > -- > Nicolas Anquetil > RMod team -- Inria Lille > <pbe.png>

April 7, 2020

[ANN] RewriteTool has successfully ported to Spec2

by Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer

Dear friends, I would like to announce that Sebastian, an intern of my company, just ported the RewriteTool to Spec2. You may find the install instructions in the following link :) https://github.com/jordanmontt/RewriteTool-Spec2 Please, help us to test it, any feedback is welcome. Regards, Juan P. SEMANTICS SRL http://semantics.bo/ https://jpsandoval.github.io/

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo

by PBKResearch

Hello Pablo (and TomaÅ¾) You asked for feedback; after a day of experiments, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have been able to navigate through my Outlook Data File, find my way to an e-mail of interest and examine the fields of interest. This means I am 90% of the way to my objective. All I want is to get the HTML code from the message body and pass it to XMLHTMLParser for further analysis. I found it not too difficult to work this out; the fact that a COMDispatchInstance can display all its internals in a playground page meant that I could work it out interactively as a playground exercise. I am still discovering things about the interface; I have only just found out that I can select an item from a list by quoting its name as an argument, rather than its number in the list. I am sure my clumsy code can be tidied up still. I can get to the 100% point in the job by exporting the contents of the e-mail to disk in HTML format, using the SaveAs procedure of the MailItem object. I can then read it back from disk into the parser. But this seems a bit clunky. The content of an HTML mail item is available in the HTMLBody property of the MailItem, so I should be able to pass it programmatically to the parser without going near the disk. This is where I run into trouble. In most of the cases I tried, this worked fine; I could display the HTML body text as a WideString in the playground, assign it to a variable and do whatever I wanted. However, for just one e-mail I tried, as soon as I selected âDo it and goâ in the playground, a message came up that the VM had crashed; the application closed, leaving only a crash dump. I cannot find anything unusual about the message that failed in this way, except that when I save it, it produces a larger file than any of the others (just over 1MB, against up to 300KB for the ones that worked). Could there be a limit on the size of some internal buffer? I thought it worth while mentioning this now, because crashing the VM is generally undesirable. I can solve my problems safely using the SaveAs route, so itâs not a problem for me. Hope this helps; if you want more details, let me know. Overall I am very happy with this library. Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of tesonep(a)gmail.com Sent: 06 April 2020 11:24 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Hi Peter, First, thanks to try to use Pharo-COM, that is great, I love to have users for it and find it is useful. Secondly, the Pharo 7 problem is an error I have introduced. It is clear that some changes I have done to support the new version of UFFI (the framework in Pharo to handle FFI calls) have broken the Pharo 7 version, so I will fix it to maintain compatibility. It is great that you were able to make it work! Cheers, On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 12:18 PM PBKResearch <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk <mailto:peter@pbkresearch.co.uk> > wrote: Hello TomaÅ¾ Many thanks for your patient explanation. I should have been able to work out for myself how the Word test works, and indeed I realized some of it when I came to shut down the Word instance and its two documents. But it was late at night, and I should have packed up before then. My last test last night showed that basically I have cracked it for my job of automating Outlook. I have been able to connect to my running instance of Outlook, open my application and interrogate the names of my top-level folders. From now on it should be just a matter of understanding the MS documentation of the Outlook model. However, all this is with Pharo-Com installed in a new Pharo 8 image. I have no idea what went wrong with my first effort on Pharo 7. But I shanât worry about that â I shall gradually move all my bits and pieces to P8. I shall try to work it out myself from here, but I shall come back if I get stuck. Thanks again Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org> > On Behalf Of TomaÅ¾ Turk Sent: 06 April 2020 08:04 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> > Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Hello Peter, If you look at the code in the Word test you will notice that the test firstly - creates a new Word instance, - makes it visible to the end user, - then adds an empty document to the documents collection with the text "Hello from Pharo!" - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. After that, the test - adds a new empty document to the documents collection with the text "Hello from Pharo! Some additional text. ", this time as an array of two texts - it activates this second document (this imitates the end user's window activation on the desktop) - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. If you look at the Task Manager, you'll notice that you have one Word process with two open documents: Namely, for each document Word creates a new, separate window - the documents are not displayed in one "Word application window", but separately - that's a normal behavior for some versions of MS Office, and it happens also if you open several documents directly in Word. So, there is just one Word instance. 'finalize' clears the references to the Word instance, it doesn't close the program by itself. If you want to do that, you can send Quit message to Word before you destroy the reference (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.application.quit(metho…) Similar behaviour is with Outlook, here's one example: https://www.excelcommand.com/excel-help/excel-how-to.php?i=124116 The calling among COM objects is asynchronous, and it's usually wise to wrap it in error handling structures. Please tell us how it goes. Best wishes, Tomaz ------ Original Message ------ From: "PBKResearch" <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk <mailto:peter@pbkresearch.co.uk> > To: "Any question about pharo is welcome" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> > Sent: 5.4.2020 23:18:02 Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Pablo - a final update before I close for the night. The Word test on the pharo 8 version comes up green. The strange error message is nowhere to be seen in any Pharo 8 runs. The result is not what I expected; I finish up with two Word documents open, one with the first message, the other with the two messages. I thought the 'finalize' command would close it down. Anyway, it looks as if I need to switch to P8 to use Pharo-Com. I shall continue testing tomorrow on P8. Sorry for the late-night hassle. Peter -- Pablo Tesone. tesonep(a)gmail.com <mailto:tesonep@gmail.com>

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Latest PharoJS Success Story; Wasm/WASI; very keen on Pony for the Pharo VM

by Noury Bouraqadi

Shaping, That's right. Your phone's OS is too old. The Brain Treats app requires Android 4.4.4 or above. Thanks for the pointer to pony. Looks interesting. I'll have a look. But, I'm not involved in Pharo VM. You should instead send it to the VM mailing-list in a dedicated message. Best, Noury > On 3 Apr 2020, at 21:05, Shaping <shaping(a)uurda.org> wrote: > > All: > > Brain Treats got stuck during launch on my LG. > > > Which android version are you using ? > > The phone is old and this is likely the problem. > > Android version: 4.4.2 > Kernel version: 3.4.0 > > > Is there a plan to move PharoJS to Wasm/WASI? > > > Dave and I talked about it a long time ago. This sounds like a good idea. > Actually, Dave has a very ambition idea = turn PharoJS into Pharo* where * can be different targets. > But, there's a lot to do before reaching this goal. So, don't expect it any time soon. > > Not to change the topic too much, but the following is related and I often think of itâ¦ > > Consider writing the pharo VM in Wasm or, better, with Pony (which can emit Wasm, as needed). Ponyâs reference-capability-based (ref-cap) concurrency-model guarantees provably that no data-races or deadlocks can happen if the code compiles; this solves a very large class of extremely ugly concurrency problems that no one ever wants to face. > > Pony gives high-performance concurrency (5 to 15 ns actor-thread switching time, depending on platform), and solves the most difficult class of synchronization problems at compile time. It runs as fast as C. It runs faster than C, as concurrency scales. You canât scale a highly concurrent app efficiently in C, and really shouldnât try if you wish to remain happy and mentally healthy. > > Pony is still pre-1.0, but the group is very active and competent. I think we should consider using it to build the VM. Have a look. Some videos for your amusement and information: > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODBd9S1jV2s <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODBd9S1jV2s> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JfYa413fY <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JfYa413fY> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNdnr1MUXp8 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNdnr1MUXp8> > https://www.ponylang.io/ <https://www.ponylang.io/> > > There are many others. I mentioned the Pony concurrency architecture around the holidays, but there was no interest from the listânot a good time perhaps. > The tentative plan is to do what Google does with Flutter: have the JIT in support of the usual dynamicity a Smalltalker needs for rapid development; and have AOT, fully optimized compiling for production or speed-related reality checks, presumably needed less often during development. There are other possibilities. > > Anyone interested? > > I have some ideas for simplifying use of the six ref caps in the context of Pharo/Smalltalk. If this path is chosen, one must commit to strict state-machine-based algorithm development, without exception. This should have happened anyway by now, broadly in the programming space, but didnât. Iâm working on a programming graphical tool and associated grammar (in VW) that make state-machine development easy and attractive. This , besides efficient use of machine resources, is the other reason for pushing in this direction. > > A Pony program is built from a net of asynchronously communicating actors. You change the state of your program with asynchronous messaging between actors. There is no blocking--no mutexes or semaphoresâand therefore no wasted CPU cycles or mushrooming program complexity, as you try to use mutexes in a fine-grained way (a very bad idea). And as mentioned, there are never deadlocks or data-races. All cores on all CPUs stay busy, always, until the program goes idle or exits. The Pony group is also working on extending the model to the network level, so that all machine nodes in the network stay busy. In the round, as a start, think of Pony as Erlang/OTP, but much faster, with no legacy bugs, and provably no-deadlocking on compile. > > The asynchronous actor model is the programming pattern that Kay had in mind when he said âobject-oriented.â Itâs the one I want to implement in Pharo. The green threads are light, but donât efficiently use the cores, and a net of VMs with their respective images still communicate too slowly. > > I your time permits, please study Pony for a bit, before rejecting the idea as too big a change in direction or too complicated. Using Pony looks like the ideal VM simplification strategy, if our aim is efficient use of networks of machines, each with at least one CPU (often more), each, in turn, with many cores (whose numbers are still increasing). This pattern in hardware probably wonât be changing much, now that speeds are topping out. Winning the performance game is therefore about efficiently using many cores at once, without burdening the programmer. I donât see a better way to do this now than with Pony. > > Thoughts and suggestions are welcome. > > Shaping > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org>] On > > Behalf Of N. Bouraqadi > > Sent: Tuesday, 28 January, 2020 12:18 > > To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>> > > Subject: [Pharo-users] Latest PharoJS Success Story > > > > The latest PharoJS-powered smartphone app is now live. > > Development has been made using Pharo. > > Then, javascript code is generated using PharoJS. > > Last, the app is built to target both iOS and Android thanks to Apache > > Cordova. > > > > Learn more and Download at > > https://nootrix.com/projects/brain-treats-app/ <https://nootrix.com/projects/brain-treats-app/> > > > > Noury > > > >

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Test Completion has been added to Pharo 8 - please test!

by shaunalan

sdfsdfdsf -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Test Completion has been added to Pharo 8 - please test!

by shaunalan

The sale was moving along smoothly for Redondo Beach-based land agent App Design Companies <https://www.cmolds.com/> , mobile game apps development <https://www.cmolds.com/game-app-development> and her client earlier this month until the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders hit. a few of weeks into escrow, the customer dropped out and Martini scrambled to seek out a replacement. âIt was due to the coronavirus and therefore the fear and instability of whatâs to return ,â said Martini, a Movoto agent. âThe buyer backed out due to job instability. With the stock exchange tanking and thousands of layoffs, most are quite afraid to form the move.â -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

April 6, 2020

What Effect Will COVID-19 and the Stay-At-Home Order Have on the Real Estate Market?

by shaunalan

The sale was moving along smoothly for Redondo Beach-based land agent App Design Companies <https://www.cmolds.com/> , mobile game apps development <https://www.cmolds.com/game-app-development> and her client earlier this month until the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders hit. a few of weeks into escrow, the customer dropped out and Martini scrambled to seek out a replacement. âIt was due to the coronavirus and therefore the fear and instability of whatâs to return ,â said Martini, a Movoto agent. âThe buyer backed out due to job instability. With the stock exchange tanking and thousands of layoffs, most are quite afraid to form the move.â -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo

by tesonep＠gmail.com

Hi Peter, First, thanks to try to use Pharo-COM, that is great, I love to have users for it and find it is useful. Secondly, the Pharo 7 problem is an error I have introduced. It is clear that some changes I have done to support the new version of UFFI (the framework in Pharo to handle FFI calls) have broken the Pharo 7 version, so I will fix it to maintain compatibility. It is great that you were able to make it work! Cheers, On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 12:18 PM PBKResearch <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote: > Hello TomaÅ¾ > > > > Many thanks for your patient explanation. I should have been able to work > out for myself how the Word test works, and indeed I realized some of it > when I came to shut down the Word instance and its two documents. But it > was late at night, and I should have packed up before then. > > > > My last test last night showed that basically I have cracked it for my job > of automating Outlook. I have been able to connect to my running instance > of Outlook, open my application and interrogate the names of my top-level > folders. From now on it should be just a matter of understanding the MS > documentation of the Outlook model. > > > > However, all this is with Pharo-Com installed in a new Pharo 8 image. I > have no idea what went wrong with my first effort on Pharo 7. But I shanât > worry about that â I shall gradually move all my bits and pieces to P8. I > shall try to work it out myself from here, but I shall come back if I get > stuck. > > > > Thanks again > > > > Peter Kenny > > > > *From:* Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> *On Behalf Of *TomaÅ¾ > Turk > *Sent:* 06 April 2020 08:04 > *To:* Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > *Subject:* Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo > > > > Hello Peter, > > > > If you look at the code in the Word test you will notice that the test > firstly > > - creates a new Word instance, > > - makes it visible to the end user, > > - then adds an empty document to the documents collection with the text > "Hello from Pharo!" > > - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. > > > > After that, the test > > - adds a new empty document to the documents collection with the text > "Hello from Pharo! Some additional text. ", this time as an array of two > texts > > - it activates this second document (this imitates the end user's window > activation on the desktop) > > - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. > > > > If you look at the Task Manager, you'll notice that you have one Word > process with two open documents: > > > > > > Namely, for each document Word creates a new, separate window - the > documents are not displayed in one "Word application window", but > separately - that's a normal behavior for some versions of MS Office, and > it happens also if you open several documents directly in Word. So, there > is just one Word instance. > > > > 'finalize' clears the references to the Word instance, it doesn't close > the program by itself. If you want to do that, you can send Quit message to > Word before you destroy the reference ( > https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.application.quit(metho… > ). > > > > Similar behaviour is with Outlook, here's one example: > https://www.excelcommand.com/excel-help/excel-how-to.php?i=124116 > > > > The calling among COM objects is asynchronous, and it's usually wise to > wrap it in error handling structures. > > > > Please tell us how it goes. > > > > Best wishes, > > Tomaz > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ------ Original Message ------ > > From: "PBKResearch" <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk> > > To: "Any question about pharo is welcome" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> > > Sent: 5.4.2020 23:18:02 > > Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo > > > > Pablo - a final update before I close for the night. The Word test on the > pharo 8 version comes up green. The strange error message is nowhere to be > seen in any Pharo 8 runs. The result is not what I expected; I finish up > with two Word documents open, one with the first message, the other with > the two messages. I thought the 'finalize' command would close it down. > > > > Anyway, it looks as if I need to switch to P8 to use Pharo-Com. I shall > continue testing tomorrow on P8. > > > > Sorry for the late-night hassle. > > > > Peter > > > > -- Pablo Tesone. tesonep(a)gmail.com

April 6, 2020

Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo

by PBKResearch

Hello TomaÅ¾ Many thanks for your patient explanation. I should have been able to work out for myself how the Word test works, and indeed I realized some of it when I came to shut down the Word instance and its two documents. But it was late at night, and I should have packed up before then. My last test last night showed that basically I have cracked it for my job of automating Outlook. I have been able to connect to my running instance of Outlook, open my application and interrogate the names of my top-level folders. From now on it should be just a matter of understanding the MS documentation of the Outlook model. However, all this is with Pharo-Com installed in a new Pharo 8 image. I have no idea what went wrong with my first effort on Pharo 7. But I shanât worry about that â I shall gradually move all my bits and pieces to P8. I shall try to work it out myself from here, but I shall come back if I get stuck. Thanks again Peter Kenny From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces(a)lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of TomaÅ¾ Turk Sent: 06 April 2020 08:04 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Hello Peter, If you look at the code in the Word test you will notice that the test firstly - creates a new Word instance, - makes it visible to the end user, - then adds an empty document to the documents collection with the text "Hello from Pharo!" - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. After that, the test - adds a new empty document to the documents collection with the text "Hello from Pharo! Some additional text. ", this time as an array of two texts - it activates this second document (this imitates the end user's window activation on the desktop) - then it tests whether it can receive the same text back from Word. If you look at the Task Manager, you'll notice that you have one Word process with two open documents: Namely, for each document Word creates a new, separate window - the documents are not displayed in one "Word application window", but separately - that's a normal behavior for some versions of MS Office, and it happens also if you open several documents directly in Word. So, there is just one Word instance. 'finalize' clears the references to the Word instance, it doesn't close the program by itself. If you want to do that, you can send Quit message to Word before you destroy the reference (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.application.quit(metho…) Similar behaviour is with Outlook, here's one example: https://www.excelcommand.com/excel-help/excel-how-to.php?i=124116 The calling among COM objects is asynchronous, and it's usually wise to wrap it in error handling structures. Please tell us how it goes. Best wishes, Tomaz ------ Original Message ------ From: "PBKResearch" <peter(a)pbkresearch.co.uk <mailto:peter@pbkresearch.co.uk> > To: "Any question about pharo is welcome" <pharo-users(a)lists.pharo.org <mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> > Sent: 5.4.2020 23:18:02 Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo Pablo - a final update before I close for the night. The Word test on the pharo 8 version comes up green. The strange error message is nowhere to be seen in any Pharo 8 runs. The result is not what I expected; I finish up with two Word documents open, one with the first message, the other with the two messages. I thought the 'finalize' command would close it down. Anyway, it looks as if I need to switch to P8 to use Pharo-Com. I shall continue testing tomorrow on P8. Sorry for the late-night hassle. Peter

April 6, 2020