posted 30 September 2004 07:07            

Is the use of Smalltalk global variables considered an appropriate practice in Kyma? For example is it 'encouraged" to do things like:
Smalltalk at:#Foobar put:myFoobarObj ?

Do such assignments become a permament part of the Kyma image and survive across restarting the program?

Is there a better way to approach this?

Thx,

posted 30 September 2004 13:11            

Preferences fooBar: [:x :y | x+ y].

To access your function you would send Preferences an accessing message, eg.

Preferences fooBar value: 1 value: 2

should return 3 when evaluated.

I haven't tried storing a code block in preferences this way, but if you'd like to give it a try, the worst that can happen is that you have to recreate your preferences file. (All you would have to do is restart Kyma holding down the caps lock key in order to start up with no preferences. Then Kyma would save a new preferences file the next time you quit).
Oh, and you might want to give your functions unique names that are unlikely to already be in the Preferences as real methods... maybe preface them with dk for your initials or something. Also, you might want to create a text file that saves all of your functions one by one in Preference, because when a new release comes out, you'll have to re-save them.

posted 30 September 2004 15:27            

One question: what is the selector to delete an association (Preferences removeAt: #foo does not work).

I kind of like the brevity of the KymaPreferences class for storing and retrieving objects. Is there a similar class, or is it safe to create a new KymaPreferences object and use that. What I am looking to do is something like:

Preferences DKFunctions: aKymaPreference

and use constructs of the type "Preferences DKFunctions Foo value:" to invoke a stored function. Putting them all in an object (DKFunctions) would cut down on clutter in Preferences.