. .

st4u

ST 4U 231: Code Completion in VA 8.5.1

May 11, 2012 9:13:01.185

Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the upgrades to code completion in VA Smalltalk 8.5.1. 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:

Code Completion.

If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.

You can also watch it on YouTube:


Today we'll go back to code completion in VA Smalltalk - there have been a lot of improvements in the 8.5.1 release. When the video from STIC 2012 is released (check the conference pages regularly), you should definitely watch it. In the meantime, let's open up a workspace and have a look. Notice that we've defined our variables as temps; the code completion support relies on having a valid compilation environment. If you don't have that, you won't see suggestions:

Code Completion

One of the niftier new things is camel case support. Try typing in RWS - you should see suggestions immediately, although you can always hit ctrl-space to get them:

camel case

The new support is smart enough to split on the case changes, and match RWS to ReadWriteStream. What's really nice is that it also works for keyword messages, splitting both on case and colons. Try creating an OrderedCollection and then entering aai:

camel case

Notice that it matched for messages in the collection hierarchy - the support takes note of the compilation environment, and uses it to give you better answers.

Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Enclosures:
[st4u231-iPhone.m4v ( Size: 2885523 )]

posted by James Robertson

 Share Tweet This