Re: Message tracking in Self

[Mario.Wolczko@Eng.Sun.COM (Mario Wolczko)]

The standard approach to message tracking is to use transparant
forwarders, but I thought I'd mention one other technique which might
be relevant, given that you may want to track every message in a
computation, not just ones to specific objects.

The idea is to use the debugger to execute the program, single
stepping under program control.  That is, you drive the debugger from
your program, rather than in the usual, interactive way.  You can then
see the complete state of the computation unfold.  Of course, it will
be much slower than really running the program, but if you are doing
significant work for every message send anyway, it might not be too
bad.

Caveat: I've done this before in Smalltalk, but not in Self.  Given
that the Self bytecode set is much simpler than Smalltalk's it should
be straightforward.

-Mario