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From: johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Organization of st80 programs
Message-ID: <80500075@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 11 Sep 89 11:46:00 GMT
References: <57318@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
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Nf-ID: #R:aerospace.AERO.ORG:57318:p.cs.uiuc.edu:80500075:000:767
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Sep 11 06:46:00 1989


As a matter of fact, class categories are the main way to organize classes.
There are a number of design techniques that are commonly used, such as
building a subsystem whose interface to the outside world consists of only
one or two classes.  The ST-80 compiler is a good example of this.  When
possible, all the classes in the subsystem are put in one category.
Unfortunately, there is no way to hide all but the interface classes.
However, it is pretty easy to implement "modules"; one of my students
had a class project in which classes could be stored in pools other than
Smalltalk.  Smalltalk programmers seem to get along reasonably well with
the tools in the system, but large applications could definitely use
tools that increased modularity.

Ralph Johnson