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From: dpbsmith@well.sf.ca.us (Daniel P. B. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: ST/V versus ST-80 on a Mac II
Summary: Smalltalk/V Mac has many rough edges in terms of the Mac environment.
Message-ID: <17834@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 5 May 90 22:16:31 GMT
References: <610@msor0.UUCP>
Lines: 58



I can't compare Smalltalk-80 to Smalltalk/V Mac, but I can tell you about
my experiences with Smalltalk/V Mac.  The price is right.  The manual is
very good and has the right amount of tutorial material at about the right
level for me.  

The product has many rough edges as a Mac product.  I can't vouch for how it
is as a Smalltalk product, but I sense some unevenness their, too.  This is
my first exposure to Smalltalk and my initial reaction is that all of the
lower level stuff (e.g. the collection concepts, the way numbers are handled,
the stream concept, etc.) is blindingly elegant, but the higher level stuff
(how you put an application model together) is not so wonderful.  

From the Mac point of view, there are outright bugs.  For example, if you
are running under the Finder, and you bring up a desk accessory that has
a menu (e.g. KeyCaps if you want to replicate the bug -- Acta happens to be
the DA I really want to use), Smalltalk/V rewrites the menu bar AFTER the
DA has added its menu, i.e. it wipes out the menu.  (Workaround: use
Multifinder).  

Another example of an outright bug: the "Directory hasFileNamed: fileName"
method is case sensitive; i.e. if a directory contains a file named
'XEROX', Directory hasFileNamed: 'Xerox' returns "false", even though these
are equivalent in the Mac environment.

Mel Conway believes there is a bug in the way it keeps track of GrafPorts.

There are some places where I do not know whether I have a legitimate 
complaint, i.e. I don't know whether certain things which are irritatingly
non-Macish are just sloppy, or whether they are validated by being faithfully
Smalltalkish.  Mac environments (e.g. MPW, Logo) that have a scrolling 
worksheet model tend to have a convention that if nothing is selected, and
you press the ENTER key, rather than executing nil it assumes that you 
wanted to execute the contents of the line the cursor is on.  I find that
convenient.  Smalltalk V/Mac doesn't do this.

Another problem I have as a Machead is that the model of text editing used
in Smalltalk/V, while quite similar in flavor to Mac text editing, is
different enough to cause problems.  There seem to be no tools for 
word-wrapping text, and I don't quite know how to describe this but
proportionally-spaced text is not handled quite properly.  It is shipped
preset for the very ugly Mac monospaced font Monaco 12, and one reason is
that you tend to find subtle little problems in text display when you use
other fonts.  For example, Princeton (a math/scientific font in which there
are superscripts and subscripts that perhaps go higher and lower than other
fonts tend to) tends to overwrite bits of itself on adjacent lines, leave
pixel crumbs behind, etc.

It looks to me like a respectable, usable port of their Smalltalk into the
Mac environment.  It does use normal Mac paraphernalia like menus, windows,
etc.  It does give reasonably good access to the Mac toolbox.  I.e. it does
not treat the Mac as a 68000 with a raw bitmapped screen.  But it is NOT
a "real" Mac product.

-- Daniel P. B. Smith
dpbsmith@WELL
508 967-5599