F-Script



Phillippe Mougin (hope I got that right) presented his Smalltalkish programming language for MacOSX.

The system consists primarily of an interactive shell and some tools such as an addition to the InterfaceBuilder palette and a means by which you can bind to running Cocoa applications to inspect (and manipulate) their object graphs.

The language is also a sort of OO version of APL, that allows for message sends to entire arrays of objects at once. A good example (the one shown in the demonstration) was that of a class browser (an array browser which contained the defined classes). The browser had a column added to it and the column was defined as #superclass, which was the message sent to the items in the original array to determine the second array. The result was a very simple superclass/subclass correspondence. The example is a little contrived, but the implication (I think) is that it is 1. very easy to do data manipulation on structured data sets (rows of database tables) and 2. because of the dynamic dispatching of messages, you could do some very cool data processing by taking advantage of the polymophism of objects.

The technical track session titled Smalltalkiana is going to go into much more detail about this aspect of fscript.

The only obvious shortcoming of fscript is that it is not possible to extend the existing Cocoa classes using it. This limits its usefulness to being an extension language for applications that are mostly written in Cocoa. You can write full featured apps using fscript, but if you cannot define new classes you are limited in your expressive power.

The coolest thing about it (IMHO) is the ability to connect to running apps to manipulate the object within. This is implemented through a third party (open-source) product called F-Script Anywhere

Posted: Tue - October 28, 2003 at 12:01 PM      

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