Not really because those concepts are already explained in other chapters. Blocks and conditions and why conditions are the way they are are explained in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 explains messages in general including the use of parentheses , how messages are sent , the different kind of messages , when to use a block and when to use parentheses, cascades etc etc.

Chapter 5 explains the model system of Pharo, method lookup , self sends, super sends and much more. So the chapter we are writing will go between Chapter 4 and 5 and offer a smoother introduction to OO. The focus is to offer a practical approach to the very fundamentals with as little overlap as possible with other chapters.

Part II of PBE goes deeper also, chapter 13 covers classes and metclasses in great detail, Chapter 14 which is about Reflection describes method dictionaries , accessing run time context, intercepting MNUs etc.

Stef once also published a very detailed chapter on Blocks with many advanced features . This used to be in Pharo for the Enterprise , now should be in PharoInProgress.

And yes I understand how messages work.

The iink your provided is a reference documentation and I dont like this kind of documentation sinking inside theory with few practical examples. Quite the opposite of PBE and frankly a really bad way to teach coding especially to a newcomer and someone unfamiliar with OOP.



On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Hilaire <hilaire@drgeo.eu> wrote:
Le 29/03/2015 15:18, kilon alios a ��crit :
> For example message passing suppose to be this super powerful feature
> , that diffirentiate from method calls in the essence that the user
> does not need to know the internals of the class. But I have not seen
> a class that take advantage of this feature inside pharo. In every
> single case if I had exchanged the message passing with method calls I
> would not have even noticed the difference. In every case I have
> studied each message corresponds to a method with exactly the same
> name.�� I am sure maybe one day will come handly , but I dont see why
> one needs to explain a feature that rarely someone will use understand
> how to code in a specific environment.

Hello,

You may really take a look at the *first* paragraph of Alan Lovejoy's
article mentioned in my previous message, and pass it to the student as
well:

http://www.smalltalk.org/articles/article_20100320_a3_Getting_The_Message.html


Without this understanding, one fails to understand why #ifTrue:
argument is a block, or why #and: message's argument is a block[]
surrounded by parenthesis(), then the beginner may have a hard time to
use correctly the class libraries.

Best,

--
Dr. Geo - http://drgeo.eu
iStoa - http://istoa.drgeo.eu