On Dec 17, 2004, at 1:05 PM, Tom Gersic wrote:
This comment illustrates exactly the problem with the bulk of the documentation. Our tendency is to document classes, not usage patterns. This makes the documentation useful for people who already know what they're doing, but not so helpful for people who don't.Agreed. I also think there's a need for more code-syntax documentation. Since the SC3 syntax is somewhat different from other programming languages with which I'm familiar (I've never coded in Smalltalk before, so maybe that's my problem...I'm more of a Perl/PHP programmer by trade), sometimes simple constructs are difficult to figure out how to code. Figuring out simple coding-issues takes away time from working on more important things. This list has been extraordinarily helpful, but there are some things that should be documented, such as how to implement a hash, or how to write a switch statement...both are things I know how to do in SC now, but I had some trouble figuring out initially. Oh, and string manipulation...I think that's another area that I had some difficulty with. Oh, how nice it would be to have an O'Reily SC3 Pocket-Reference :-). Anyway, I know it takes valuable time to write out these sorts of things, and if I *really* want better syntax documentation, I should just write it myself...I just thought I'd mention it in case someone's sitting out there thinking, "I wonder what I should write about today".
syntax is pretty well documented under the Language column in the help files (Literals, Method-Calls, ... Syntax-Shortcuts, etc.).
what is missing?