Code H’yung: Ropes

It’s been a long time, and after fighting the same sort of hesitancy I experienced with my side projects, I am back with at least the beginning of another Code H’yung. If I get to the code this week, then we get to it. I make no promises other than Programming Excellence, in one form or another.

Back in the July 6 edition of Helltime, I touched on an article at PC Plus about ropes, a logical extension of strings. I will endeavor here to write a small ropes library in Smalltalk.

First, I want to document what this small domain will look like: its data structures and the responsibilities of those structures.

Getters and Setters: a people problem

Greetings ladies and gentleman, it is I, El MoffDo, here to escort you on this excursion into Programming Excellence for the next 1300 words on this, the EIP web-ring.

For no particular reason, I was perusing a Smalltalk tutorial and duly noted this:

Class Date defines an instance method named “year” that answers the value of the instance variable named “year” in the instance of Date to which the message “year” is sent.

So this was Smalltalk, the revered and noble language that really made me “get” what objects were all about, tacitly sanctioning a getter. Narrowing my Google search down, I was able to find an entire page dedicated to the topic.

Look out behind you, lady, it’s the Blob!

I was going to write about our second requirements session for the Carbon Copy Whiteboard. But I wanted to do something a little less structured. Requirements aren’t that important anyway. </sarcasm>

I’ll note that I write this post at a time when I really just don’t feel like writing a post. But I’m sticking with my Atwood blog diet of posting even if you don’t have anything to say or don’t feel like it.

Anyway, the Blob is better known as the Binary Large OBject. Its use is obvious: storing images, movies, PDFs, or any other kind of binary data. But of what possible use can CLOBs be? A CLOB is a Character Large OBject.