[Help-smalltalk] Re: Starting with smalltalk

[Paolo Bonzini]

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> I've been reading the GNU smalltalk manual, but the following I havn't
> been able to find on the web yet:
> - A GNU smalltalk compatible, functional program
You mean a program written with gst?  Unfortunately I don't know of any 
:-(  Mike Anderson has some on his blog, but they're small.
> - A way of seperating smalltalk source over multiple files
You write the source code in multiple files, and then provide a loading 
script that loads them all (optionally saving everything to an image 
file, see later).
> - A way of editing smalltalk files without the use of a commercial IDE
GNU Smalltalk has an Emacs mode.
> - A way of running smalltalk probrams like other programs (from the
> commandline) without the need of a wrapper script (The normal
> '#!/usr/bin/env doesn't work, nor could i find ways of creating
> bytecode/packages/binaries)
You can use (with GNU Smalltalk 2.2)

#! /usr/bin/env gst -f

or

#! /bin/sh
"exec" "gst" "-f" "$0" "$@"

GNU Smalltalk special cases the #! at the beginning of a file as a 
one-line command.  Comments are quote-delimited in Smalltalk, so the 
second line is eaten by GNU Smalltalk's parser in the second example.

In addition, GNU Smalltalk can save a snapshot of its status in an image 
(.im) file that can be made executable with chmod.  Making something run 
automatically when the image file is reloaded is feasible.  Just create 
a class-side method named #update: including some code like

update: aspect
   "Flush instances of the receiver when an image is loaded."
   aspect == #returnFromSnapshot ifTrue: [ self restart ]!

and then evaluate code like

ObjectMemory
   addDependent: NameOfTheClassWithTheUpdateMethod;
   snapshot: 'myprogram.im'

Then, running gst with "gst -I myprogram.im" (or just making 
myprogram.im executable) will invoke the #restart method on the class 
NameOfTheClassWithTheUpdateMethod.

Paolo