Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!apollo!apollo.hp.com!yon
From: yon@apollo.HP.COM (David Yon)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: SmallTalk/V Goodies disks?
Message-ID: <494f93f0.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 20 Mar 90 18:23:00 GMT
References: <228@huntsai.UUCP> <6301@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Sender: root@apollo.HP.COM
Reply-To: yon@apollo.HP.COM (David Yon)
Followup-To: comp.lang.smalltalk
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Organization: Hewlett-Packard Apollo Division - Chelmsford, MA
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In article <228@huntsai.UUCP> george@huntsai.UUCP (George Williams) writes:
>Can anyone tell me about the "Goodies disks" that Digitalk sells?
>I've seen them referenced in their newsletter (including prices), but
>never a description of what's on them.
>

Goodies #3 includes an "Application Browser", which allows you to partition
the class hierarchy into seperate "Applications", rather than seeing 
absolutely everything in the system.  There is of course also a "system"
application, which always contains the entire tree.

THIS MY FRIEND IS A GODSEND!  It's worth the price of the Goodies #3 alone,
even if you never use the rest of the stuff on the disk.  One of my biggest
complaints as I was acclimating to the environment was the fact that your
application gets lost in the morass of all the system classes that get 
shipped with the base level image.  With the Application Browser, you
can build your application and know EXACTLY what new classes you created,
and which classes you modified to support the application.

BUY IT, you won't be sorry.  I don't know of any other commercially available
package for Smalltalk/V which accomplishes this.  If someone out there knows
of something, I'd sure like to hear about it.

The communications disk is also worth the price if you need to interface 
your application to a modem.  I don't agree with how they did some of the
classes, but otherwise it works reasonably well.  I'm prototyping a mail system
that uses GEnie and CompuServe for delivery, and the comm disk has worked
well for that purpose.  The other bonus is that it gives a very complete
example of programming your own assembly-language primitives.  This proved
invaluable when I coded a CRC routine in assembler and needed to pass values
between the assembly and Smalltalk.  It was only then did I find out how 
inadequate the Digitalk documentation was for user primitives.

David Yon