[Help-smalltalk] smalltalk-2.0.5: doc problems

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Learning Smalltalk through the tutorial, I noticed four things:


1) Confusing info printed by 'inspect':

st> Object inspect !
An instance of Object class

st> Dictionary inspect !
An instance of Dictionary class

But these are instances of Class, not of Object/Dictionary/..., because
objects of type Object/Dictionary/... don't understand the 'new' message.
Example:

st> Dictionary new printNl !
Dictionary (
)

st> Dictionary new new printNl !
Object: Dictionary new: 32 "<0x60034db8>" error: did not understand #new

The message should IMO therefore read:

st> Object inspect !
An instance of Class

st> Dictionary inspect !
An instance of Class


2) In gst.dvi (generated by "make dvi") p. 96, the footnote 28, applying
to the 'blockCopy:' method, is not found. It is just missing. Maybe a
texinfo error? It's the last footnote of the document.


3) Also, I had problems generating the dvi file because of the @copying
and @insertcopying commands that my version of texinfo doesn't understand.
This would go away if you shipped the texinfo.tex file in the doc directory
instead of in the config directory.


4) The gst-libs and gst-base documentations are lacking an important thing:
the subclass relations. IMO, every section about a class should, before
the method descriptions, mention which is the superclass and which are the
known subclasses (optimally even as hyperlinks in HTML and info). It is
essentially impossible to understand a class' method descriptions if you
don't know its superclass.

Bruno