But these are implementation details...implementation of the base system. /From the perspective of a programmer writing an application/, none of this matters. As I said earlier, the only reason why Smalltalk has to deal with files at all is because we live in a file-based culture. And the reason our culture is so entrenched with files is because we are too heavily invested in them, and we aren't going to budge. *Files are about as low a storage abstraction as you can get*, and they pre-date even Unix. Yes, files belong in the Stone Age! kilon.alios wrote
That's the thing you can't take the argument further without diminishing the value of you argument precisely for the fact that the vm is far closer related to the image than it is to 0s and 1s. That tight relation is fundamental to the behavior and existence of the image. It defines its functionality, purpose and limitations.
The image itself is a file and the fact that it can store live state in a binary format does not make it unique or any less of a file. In my case I use blender files, they store the entire live state of the blender window including images and even Python scripts. Similar examples are countless out there.
So the answer to the question what makes the image file format unique is simply.... Nothing What's the advantage of using the image format compared to other files ? None
On Mon, 7 Dec 2015 at 15:14, Ben Coman <
btc@
> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Dimitris Chloupis <
kilon.alios@
>
wrote:
"A Smalltalk Image is your entire system. The Image includes all the tools required to interact, customize and add functionality to your system, so Smalltalkâs IDE is a very Integrated Development Environment."
Thats not the case even for someone like me that has been working with smalltalk for only 2 years. The Image is not even the engine that drives smalltalk . Thats the job of the VM that exists in a completely different universe than smalltalk. It exists in the same universe than many other languages do exists and thats the C universe, the universe of the OS. Essentially what drives your system is not smalltalk is C. The diffirence is that for a part of it that is high level enough, Slang is used, a Hybrid language between C and Smalltalk that compiles to C. So while in the image everything is , well almost everything, an object all the way down, in the VM everything is C all the way down.
To take that argument further, the VM is not even the thing driving the image ;). Essentially what drives it are the 1's and 0's of machine code. Further, what drives that are the electrons flowing through the chip. I think its fair to say that we *code* in Pharo without files. Files relate to Pharo only to the same extent that a database like Oracle or Postgres can be said to use files. That is, when you do SQL queries, are you *thinking* in terms of files, even though files are used by the server to store the data? Its just a matter of where you draw the line of abstraction.
cheers -ben
Ironically an image misses the most important tool to even generate this C code and thats the VMMaker that has to be installed separately. And of course there are parts of the system that are coded in pure C, like some core functionalities of the VM and of course plugins and external libraries that the image has to rely on make things happen.
Of course the image is still fairly powerful, you can change the syntax, implement high level libraries, IDE tools and much more. But its not the core of the system just another essential part of it.
On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 9:24 AM Dimitris Chloupis <
kilon.alios@
>
wrote:
well, i wouldn't need or even want it in memory, so on disk is fine.
the
problem is more likely management of the same. browsing the changes is not really convenient. ideally i'd like to see versions in the class-browser and in the debugger, where on error i could then take a look at older versions for comparison, and switch to them to see if maybe the last change was the cause of the error.
greetings, martin.
There are versions already for methods. So the functionality is there.
I disagree however with you, I think that changes file was created for the precise scenarios of an image crash/ lockdown. In that case you may want to go back through the code and dont remember which method was triggered or what else was defined and created. In the case going chronologically which is how the changes file is already organised is far more useful than going method and class based.
But I do agree it would be useful to extend the tools working with changes , but then none stop anyone from doing so and is not that hard to do.
-- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Stop-Thinking-in-Terms-of-Files-tp4865614p4865820.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.