9: Mainline
The enormous power of Smalltalk development
environments is derived from an unusual armamentarium of powerful tools:
- Smalltalk development environments provide powerful browsers
that allow you to examine all class and method definitionseven the
built-in classes and methods.
- Smalltalk development environments provide powerful debugging
tools. Using these tools, you see the message sequences that lead to
program interruption, you inspect parameter and variable values to zero
in on errors, you modify method definitions, and you restart or resume
your interrupted program.
- Smalltalk classes and methods are compiled as you write them,
incrementally. You never have to waste time waiting for a compiler to
translate an entire program or program module into machine instructions.