ST 4U 348: Reflecting on Class Names
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the common way to look up Smalltalk class names (things differ a bit in VisualWorks and ObjectStudio). If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
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Today we'll continue looking at reflection in Smalltalk. In most Smalltalk implementations (Cincom Smalltalk being the exception), there's one namespace (Smalltalk). Thus, looking up a class by name is simple:
clsName := 'Person'. cls := Smalltalk at: clsName asSymbol. ^cls new.
That makes reading in data from a source (a file, for instance) that includes class names pretty easy - get the class name, create an instance, and then dump data in the variables as it's found in the file. We'll take a look at that next time.
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Tags: smalltalk, va smalltalk
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