Goodbye to an Old Friend

As I type this, two devoted Cincom engineers are working thru a large number of changes accrued for the last two weeks, integrating and building a development build for VisualWorks 7.9.

And when they're done, an old friend, will have made a big step into retirement. The friend I speak of, is the very venerable ParagraphEditor object, around since the early Smalltalk-80 days.

Why retirement? Well, he was old and in the way.

For a long time, his replacement, TextEditorController has been doing most of the work. Most of the views in the system default to him, and often for those that don't, code exists to replace the default ParagraphEditor with a TextEditorController instance.

He's in the way, because we'd like to actually do some work in this area, but because the responsibilities bounce back and forth between the two, it's really difficult. Not just to implement new features, but then to figure out how they should work for the more limited ParagraphEditor, if at all. Archeology work here at Cincom, convinces me that TextEditorController always was meant as an eventual replacement of ParagraphEditor.

We're doing this a little different than when we folded the classes ApplicationWindow and ScheduledWindow together. In a current system, those two names refer to the same object. If you have method extensions or overrides, they end up in the same place. Because of the size and amount of extensions and overrides that get done to ParagraphEditor and TextEditorController, we've decided not to try and do anything clever like we did in the Window situation. The opportunity for confusion and image destruction just seemed to high.

So ParagraphEditor stays around as a distinct class for the time being. But TextEditorController no longer exists under it, but has been placed at the same level. All references to ParagraphEditor in the system have been changed to TextEditorController. All class side services that ParagraphEditor provided (things like copy/selection memory) have been moved to TextEditorController, and the ParagraphEditor methods exist still, to forward over to the TextEditorController ones.

At some point we'll empty out all of the instance behavior ParagraphEditor, and mark the class side methods as deprecated. And if I can find a nice API to help me, we might even make it so that when packages or parcels load that extend or override the former ParagraphEditor, you get a note that your methods aren't in the right place anymore.

So ParagraphEditor will stay around, but literally, he'll just be a shell of his former self.

So to ParagraphEditor we say Thank You. You've earned your place in history. Now enjoy your retirement.