Now that my image is working properly again and the fires have been put out,
I wanted to introduce myself a bit better...
My name is David Boeren. I first learned Smalltalk back in college many
years ago, we used Smalltalk V in an object oriented programming class I
took which was first-half Smalltalk, second-half C++. This would be about
1992 I think? In recent years I've mainly been using Java, with occasional
Python dabblings. I remember installing Squeak once or twice over the
years, but to be honest it felt a bit clunky, perhaps this was just an early
primitive version or whatever.
Recently, I've been getting the itch to try out some different languages. I
was kind of looking at Scala or Clojure, one co-worker suggested Erlang, and
so forth. But after doing a brief review I ended up coming back to
Smalltalk which even after all these years still stands right up with the
cutting edge I think. Sure, there are a few things that I think would be a
little different if it were designed today like tuple support or whatever,
but it feels like the right choice for something I'm going to use mainly for
"fun" projects and the interactive environment is awesome.
One thing I wanted to ask about is the status of getting Pharo running on
iOS (or at least iPad). I found some old posts but nothing much within the
last couple of years. I know there were app store policy issues in the past
but I think that Apple has opened things up a bit since then, you can now
get Pythonista in the app store, or Codea. Is there still an obstacle or is
it just something that hasn't been gotten around to yet? I'd love to get it
running on my iPad Mini and be able to transmit code back and forth between
there and my laptop to work on it wherever I'm at.
Second, I'm running into an oddity and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong or
whether this is a bug of some sort, this has to do with trying to replace
unicode characters in a string which seems like it should be a
straightforward operation. Here is my code:
"Fetch the raw JSON data from dtdb.co"
response := 'http://dtdb.co/api/cards/' asUrl retrieveContents asString.
"Clean up the data a bit to make it a little more regular"
response := response copyReplaceAll: 'null' with: '""'.
response := response copyReplaceAll: '\u2022' with: ','.
response := response copyReplaceAll: '\u009e' with: 'e'.
Basically I'm just pulling some JSON data and then doing a few string
replacements to make the data suit my needs. The first one works. The
second one works. Since the third one ALSO uses a \uXXXX code I would
expect it to work too, but it does not - the accented characters are still
there.
To get a bit more visibility into this, I copied the CopyReplaceAll code
from SequenceableCollection into a scratch class method and adding some
Transcript output:
copyReplaceIn: aString All: oldSubCollection with: newCollection
"Answer a copy of the receiver in which all occurrences of
oldSubCollection have been replaced by newCollection "
| startSearch currentIndex endIndex |
Transcript show: 'start' ; cr.
startSearch := 1.
[(currentIndex := aString indexOfSubCollection: oldSubCollection
startingAt: startSearch) > 0]
whileTrue: [
Transcript show: 'Found at index ' ; show: currentIndex
; cr.
endIndex := currentIndex + oldSubCollection size - 1.
aString := aString
copyReplaceFrom: currentIndex
to: endIndex
with: newCollection.
startSearch := currentIndex + newCollection
size].
Transcript show: 'done' ; cr.
^ aString
A minimal test seemed to work:
HelloWorld copyReplaceIn: 'R\u00e9my Lapointe' All: '\u00e9' with: 'e'.
start
Found at index 2
done
Testing this with the real data worked too:
HelloWorld copyReplaceIn: ('http://dtdb.co/api/cards/' asUrl
retrieveContents asString) All: '\u00e9' with: 'e'.
start
Found at index 22379
Found at index 22500
done
However, when I went back to using the regular copyReplaceAll:With: method
it does not work and I'm not sure why. When it executes this:
aString indexOfSubCollection: oldSubCollection startingAt: startSearch
The value comes back as 0 even though it's the same data from
'http://dtdb.co/api/cards/' asUrl retrieveContents asString (I added a "self
halt" to be able to step into the method and view the variable values), and
I'm not sure what the difference is. There shouldn't be a limit on the size
of the collection, should there? The whole thing is around 116k which is
big but not ridiculously so. It is however big enough that the debugger
can't show the whole value, or at least I haven't found a way to do so.
And last, is there a good video tutorial for the Pharo beginner on how to
use the various browsers, debugger, tools, etc... that come with Pharo? I
would like to start learning more about the best ways to use these in my
development processes. I'm also having a lot of trouble finding the correct
classes and message for what I want to do, searching online w/ Google often
seem to turn up outdated information (or for a different smalltalk flavor)
and it can take a while to figure out the correct way to do things. Is
there a good central reference for the APIs somewhere? I know that you can
search in the browser but I usually don't know the name to search for. It
would be good to have a handy reference detailing how to do all the
commonplace stuff.
Thanks!
--
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