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6: The Squeak Programming Environment

  • Page ID
    36317
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    The goal of this chapter is to show you how to develop programs in the Squeak programming environment. You have already seen how to define methods and classes using the system browser; this chapter will show you more of the features of the system browser, and introduce you to some of the other browsers.

    Of course, very occasionally you may find that your program does not work as you expect. Squeak has an excellent debugger, but like most powerful tools, it can be confusing on first use. We will walk you through a debugging session and demonstrate some of the features of the debugger.

    One of the unique features of Smalltalk is that while you are programming, you are living in a world of live objects, not in a world of static program text. This makes it possible to get very rapid feedback while programming, which makes you more productive. There are two tools that let you look at, and indeed change, live objects: the inspector and the explorer.

    The consequence of programming in a world of live objects rather than with files and a text editor is that you have to do something explicit to export your program from your Smalltalk image. The old way of doing this, also supported by all Smalltalk dialects, is by creating a fileout or a change set, which are essentially encoded text files that can be imported into another system. The new way of doing this in Squeak is to upload your code to a versioned repository on a server. This is done using a tool called Monticello, and is a much more powerful and effective way to work, especially when working in a team.

    Finally, you may find a bug in Squeak as you work; we explain how to report bugs, and how to submit bug fixes.


    This page titled 6: The Squeak Programming Environment is shared under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Andrew P. Black, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz, Damien Pollet via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.