Re: [NTLK] Soup Clues

At 11:56 AM 6/17/2008, you wrote:
>That is not only a great description, but it will look extra-great when
>future folks search the e'list archives too. :)

Well (blush) thanks for the kind words.

Usually when one gives an explanation of a complex topic, the code
geeks will chime in and call BS on the whole topic because you didn't
bow to the proper deity.

One last word, the ability of a frame to hold data and apps (code) is
very cool. The data is attached to the program, not necessarily held
in some external data file.

The way that the Newton finds things in soup is by searching up the
tree of frames. If a slot does not exist, the object storage system
of the newt continues to search up the tree until one is found. This
leads to two things - 1) if the slot is not found, you get a very
common error indicating that the slot is not found (typically a typo
in a program that can only be found at run time (there is no compile
time checking)) and 2) you can mask slots by putting a similarly
named slot lower in the hierarchy (this is how patches are done to
operating system code, your patch is found before Apple's code in
ROM). This is how the 2010 patch would have been done.

Andrei

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Received on Tue Jun 17 19:52:11 2008