Message tracking in Self

[R James Noble <kjx@Comp.VUW.AC.NZ>]

Nick

I've just reread the message you sent to the self-interest a couple of
months ago, and subsequently been impressed by your WWW pages.  (I've
been very remiss in keeping up with email - I'm sorry I didn't respond
sooner).

I'm also working on dynamic program visualisation using Self,
concentrating on abstraction in visualisation --- essentially
displaying a list, say, as a sequence of items rather than an
assemblage of list, link, and item objects.

Since I have focused on displaying objects, I have worked with
transparent forwarders, which proved rather difficult to build in
Self2.0, mostly due to the "Self" problem (with self sends and
primitive messages) and protection. I have a clearer design using
dynamic delegation (_Perform:Delegated) but this has problems of its
own.

As Mario pointed out, you are probably better off using the debugger
in single step mode. This will provide you with all messages for a
single process, spread over all objects in the program. I've tried this
in Self (although I haven't used it in anger) and it seemed to work
quite well.

kjx