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|
 Seeking Reference Material on Certain Obscure Programming Terms |
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Posted by Jeff Rush on Sun Feb 02 20:26PM CST 2003
from the udanax mailing list dept.
Hi, as I'm working through the Udanax Gold source, written in SmallTalk,
I've come across some terms with which I'm unfamilar. In some cases
people have hand-waved a brief explanation but I'd like to research them
further. I've googled for them but haven't found much, as if the terms
are very old programmer lore. I've also searched two of the standard
SmallTalk-80 books, from PARC, but no luck either.
* stepper
obviously some kind of iterator; used as a base class in Udanax Gold
but no definition of stepper is present; must be built-in to their
flavor of SmallTalk. There is some confusion over whether the
collection over which we are iterating can be mutated or not; hints
are that a stepper insulates the caller from mutations, which is
uncommon in iterators in other languages (C++, Python).
* passe
seems to be a method invoked on "self"; does it pass the call to
the parent class, trigger an exception as "subclass must
implement" or something else? If the parent lacks such a method
does it quietly do-nothing or raise an exception?
* fluid and emulsion
apparently references to an old LISP object persistence mechanism
that has found it's way into Udanax Gold/SmallTalk; I'm familar
with the persistence mechanisms of Python (pickles) and CORBA,
but I'd like to understand how fluid/emulsion compare.
Any explanatory URLs greatly appreciated!
Jeff Rush, A Xanadu Curator of
http://www.sunless-sea.net
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Re: Seeking Reference Material on Certain Obscure Programming Terms
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| Reading List |
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As We May Think,
1945
Vannevar Bush
Augmenting Human Intellect:A Conceptual Framework,
1962
Doug Engelbart
Literary Machines,
1981, 87, 93
Ted Nelson
Engines of Creation, Chapter 14
The Network of Knowledge,
1986, 87
K. Eric Drexler
Hypertext
Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge,
1986
K. Eric Drexler
SF:EarthWeb,
1999
Marc Stiegler
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