An interesting thing which I noticed during this session was the idea of protocols which are used to organise a set of methods that a class' instance respond to. I think these are intended more for humans than for the computer which I think is a really cool idea - I am strongly of the belief that programming languages provide a mechanism for communicating our intent with ourselves and with the other people on our team.

As a result of looking at the description of the 'initialize-release' protocol for Object I became intrigued about the way that objects are removed by the garbage collection. We weren’t able to find out exactly how Visual Works does garbage collection but I learnt a little bit about the way that garbage collection works in general using three different approaches - mark and sweep, copying collector and reference count.

Another thing which I found interesting was the way that Smalltalk handles exceptions - we came across this when looking at how XUnit handles passing and failing test cases. Since Smalltalk only has messages and objects there is no explicit of an exception so as I understand it objects have the ability to respond to an error signal being sent to them. (TestResult runCase:aTestCase) _~smalltalk | testCasePassed | testCasePassed := [[aTestCase runCase. true] sunitOn: self class failure do: [:signal | self failures add: aTestCase. signal sunitExitWith: false]] sunitOn: self class error do: [:signal | self errors add: aTestCase. signal sunitExitWith: false]. testCasePassed ifTrue: [self passed add: aTestCase] _~ The above is the code block we spent a bit of time looking at which I think in C# world would look a bit like this: _~csharp try { aTestCase.runCase() } catch(FailureException) { this.Failures.Add(aTestCase); } catch(ErrorException) { this.Errors.Add(aTestCase); } this.Passed.Add(aTestCase); _~ It seems easier to understand to me having exceptions as a language construct but I haven’t done much Smalltalk so maybe that’s just a preference for what’s familiar.

It took us a bit of Googling to work out how to start the SUnit TestRunner in VisualWorks but the way to do it eventually turned out to be quite simple. Typing the following code into the workspace window does it: _~smalltalk TestRunner open _~

If we continue in Smalltalk world for another week then we’ll probably play around with SUnit a bit more and perhaps get onto seaside. If not then we’ll be back to the Java modeling I imagine.