Re: Swarm on Mac OSX 10.2.2?

[Bill Northcott]

Brad Cox wrote
> which I saw nothing obvious in this quick scan. I gather the
> divergence is solely between GNU/Cygnus and Swarm, not Apple? You
> mentioned java compatibility somewhere but I saw no traces of this.

> If first impressions are right, this shouldn't be a big job. On the
> other hand, I've so far failed to assemble the dependencies to
> install the swarm RPMs on my Linux box and my main priority is
> finding a new job. I'll take a shot at integrating the differences
> but don't count on me just yet; there's far too much on my plate as
> it is.

Apart from the detail of the runtime, which I mentioned in my last 
message, there is, as I understand it a more serious problem.
What follows is strictly my take on the issue and I may have misunderstood 
this.

There is a sense in which Swarm is not even a set of object libraries 
written in Objective-C.  It is written in a language derived from 
Objective-C in the same way that Objective-C is derived from C.
The principle difference with the Swarm dialect of Objective-C is the 
phasic properties of the objects.

In normal Obj-C an object has a create method which instantiates it, other 
methods which can be used on the instantiated object, and a method to 
destroy the object.
In Swarm Obj-C there is a create phase, which begins with the Createbegin 
method and ends with the CreateEnd method.  During this phase there are a 
number of methods available which relate to the creating of the object. 
Once CreateEnd has been used create methods are no longer available.  This 
can be extended to further phases.

I confess that I don't not fully understand why this is necessary, but I 
accept the assertions of those  much more experienced than me, that it is. 
 I also understand that at the time these things were introduced Obj-C was 
seen as a dead language and as a result the Swarm development people did 
not feel constrained to conform to any standard Objective-C language.

Maybe I got this all wrong.

Bil Northcott

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