[FR-devel] what about a SmallTalkish/emacsish FreeRIDE ?

[gabriele renzi]

I've been playing with a pair of smaltallk enviroment
in these days: VisualWorks and Squeak. 
I started it cause people always says smalltalk is 
Ruby's (grand)father. 

Now that even I played with ST I can agree that, yes
ruby is a bad ripoff of smalltalk, as matz admits :).

How does this relates to FR?
Well, it does someway. 

The first concept of IDE came out from SmallTalk ,
people told me. 
And indeed, it seem that every ST distro (excpet from
Gnu-smalltalk) comes with an impressive bunch of
graphical tools.

But the thing that really impressed me is that the IDE
and the CODE are actually one thing. 
You can have your code modify the enviroment at run
time, and you can explore the inner of the ide from
the ide itself through yur code.

This is quite impressive, and it ringed a bell in my
head. Now, I remember that this was the first thing I
thought about when I heard about a ruby ide written in
ruby.

So I wonder: would it be possible, and would you be
interested, in having FR behave 
someway like this ?




----
Well, I'm going to my university courses, so I have
little time to write. But I'd love to know what you
think of this soon. 
(having a "it's impossible, stupid" before I start to
dream is better than nothing)


some sparse thoughts that I can't explain (both for
notime and for no clear idea):

smalltalk is image based 
But when FR is up it is someway a running image

debug of FR from running FR 

change every system(ruby) and `ruby ` to some kind of
eval 
(need to have some of them still there, I think, as an
option)

start block for evals in a new thread with $SAFE>0 ?

taint all newly created object (thos in the block) to
avoid killing FR

faster run/correct/run/correct cycle, No need to start
a new interpreter

allows to change STDIN,STDOUT, $deferr and so on, so
they could act in the graphical enviroment

gets() and the like could pop up some input box,
fixing the need to use the cli to input and to the
outputpane to get the result. Choice to embed IRB more
easily?

no need for '2>&1'. Choice to have different outputs
for stdout and stderr even on platform not directly
supporting it .

some kind of 'do: ' textbox to change FR at runtime

Faster plugin development

chance to set ARGV dynamically from 'do:'-box, no need
for special subsystem

you could actually use ruby to code 
(i.e. in the 'do:'-box put "EditPane.text.gsub
/old_met_name/ , 'new_met' ")

better, highlight and right-click to 'local do:'-box
to have commands 
executed on a block of code

refactoring methods from do-box ? 
(highlight->rightclick->box->write 'extract_meth' in
the box-> execute)

emacs!

fr someway like irb**3 ?

choice to hijack File-related classes so that we can
add a 
'remove file script.output.txt before you restart
script.rb?' 

would it be possible to hijack ruby so that we could
register constants/module/class/method definitions?
someway like debug.rb? No more need for a home built
parser?

freeride as a framework (do-box ->Dialog.new 'Hello
from FR world!' )

freeride as an interactive learning experience :)

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icq #69488917

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