Hi Ben, On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 6:41 PM Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com> wrote:
> A question was asked on discord... "I know how to start the lights out > example, > and feed my objects test data with the testing framework, but how does one > start > something like ChineseCheckers? How does one find the entry point? > Is there a convention on naming a starting place?" > > I remember having similar thoughts when starting in Pharo. > > One convention I have seen is that amongst all the classes presumably > prefixed "CC" > one class would stand out being named for the application without the > prefix. > e.g. class "ChineseCheckers". That is only a narrow chance for a > namespace conflict, > the the risk still remains. > > I suggested another path would have a package tag "Application" > (i.e. "ChineseCheckers-Application") that contains a single class > which has an #open method on the class-side. > The tag "Application" sorts high up on the package-tags and is > self-descriptive. > But I've not seen that used before, so while I think its a good idea, its > not really a convention. > Conventions are only useful if they are broadly understood. > > So I'm wondering what other things people do to draw attention to their > application entry points. > I use a combination of class-side categories (instance creation, examples, api, etc) and class comments. e.g. in the class comment for StackInterpreterSimulator in VMMaker you'll find: | vm | vm := StackInterpreterSimulator newWithOptions: #(). vm openOn: '/Users/eliot/Squeak/Squeak4.4/trunk44.image'. vm setBreakSelector: #&. vm openAsMorph; run But the above is hard to find. I buy Doru's examples approach. Usually interesting objects are used in some kind of context and there may be a flow that the above illustrates, instantiation => initialization => use. All this is possible with examples, and examples have a pragma to identify them to tools. So I would push the examples direction. I guess the kernel of this approach is to create a method that creates and uses some object, and that is labelled with a specific pragma identifying it as an example. It can then serve as both a test and an example to users. > cheers -ben > _,,,^..^,,,_ best, Eliot
