Difference between revisions of "Overview"

Latest revision as of 04:25, 1 January 2009

The Mops Manual

Last Updated: 2005-12-16

Before you dive into Mops, it will be most helpful if you have an overview of the organization of this rather lengthy manual.

The Mops documentation is divided into three sections.

Mops was designed as both a serious Macintosh development language and a language that beginning and casual programmers can learn to access the powers of the Mac. This manual addresses both audiences, and some in between.

The manual is divided into these major parts:

PART I; Tutorial
The Introduction is a section is for everyone, regardless of expertise. It should be the first section of the manual you study.

We have devoted a large section of the Mops Manual to a 21 lesson tutorial, which will lead both the beginner, even someone who has never programmed a computer before, and the more experienced programmer through the essential elements of Mops. We recommend that every Mops user, regardless of expertise, work through the Tutorial. Even if you think parts of Mops resemble a language you already know, there will be significant differences that will be reinforced in the Tutorial. Plan to spend ten to twelve separate sessions over several days with the lessons in the tutorial. Mops is based on Forth, and if you have some familiarity with that language, it will certainly help. Mops adds the power of the Object Oriented paradigm to traditional Forth, as well as other very useful tools.

PART II; Reference
Six chapters in this Part provide numerous details about Mops, including considerable expansion on topics touched on in the Tutorial. Read this part only after going through the Tutorial.

PART III; Classes
This part of the manual will become one of the most used reference sections once you begin writing Mops programs. It contains details about the parts of the Mops language that have already been written for you to help you communicate your program ideas to the Macintosh's unique way of doing things. Each chapter is devoted to a category of predefined classes, and begins with a general discussion about the class. You should be familiar with the content of Part III before writing programs.

Additionally, the Mops package contains many files with the source code listings for many parts of Mops. These files are actually further documentation for you. You will get instructions in the Tutorial about how to organize them for ready reference.

Developing standalone applications

Mops can be used to produce stand-alone doubleclickable applications, whose users won't need to concern themselves with what language the application was written in. These users won't have or need access to the Mops dictionary and interpreter. Instructions for this procedure are given in the Tutorial.

What your Mops system contains

Once you have installed the Mops system as described above, you will find several folders containing Mops files. They are:

• Mops ƒ
  Essential files including:
  • The Mops kernel (Mops).
  • An image of a Mops dictionary with many of the predefined classes already loaded (Mops.dic).
• QuickEdit ƒ
  Files in this folder are for Doug Hoffman's QuickEdit programming editor.
• Mops source
  All the Mops source code. There are various other folders inside here, as follows:
  • More classes
    Source files for a number of other (possibly) useful classes.
  • System source
    Source code for the basic Mops classes and other support code.
  • Toolbox classes
    Source code for Mops classes that interact with the Mac Toolbox.
  • Module source
    Source code for the Mops modules.
  • Asm source
    Source code for the Mops 68k assembler.
  • Demo folder
    Source files for demonstration programs used in the tutorial.
• Mops manual
  Uhm. That's where the documentation you are reading is stored.

Most of the source code files in System, Toolbox, and Demo folders are provided not only for added documentation, but also if you want to recompile a modified version of Mops. A study of that code, along with the tutorial, will help you master the powers of Mops.

The predominant file you will be opening will normally be one of Mops.dic, MopsFP.dic or PowerMops. They contain the majority of the Mops words and predefined classes on which you will build programs.

Conventions used in this manual

We use a couple of conventions throughout this manual that you should be aware of.

In the Tutorial, we present many examples of things you should type into the computer.  To differentiate the characters you type from the characters that the computer generates on the screen, we stylize those characters you type. The computer's prompt and other responses are printed in regular monospace type.

In both the Tutorial and the chapters in Part II, whenever we introduce a new Mops term, or intend for you to pay special attention to the terminology, we underline the key words. When you see underlined words and phrases, it means that we are trying to acquaint you with a new term or re-emphasize a term or concept already mentioned.

You will also find many cases in the manual and in the Mops source code of Mops words being capitalized in what may seem odd places, such as in the middle of a word like bArray. While this style of capitalization is common among experienced programmers for the sake of ease of reading, rest assured that you won't have to master any scheme of capitalization in learning Mops. Mops itself is case insensitive, which means that you can type a word in all lower case, all upper case, or any combination thereof, and Mops will recognize it as the same word. As you become more experienced in Mops, the capitalization standards we have set will make more sense to you.

Special note to experienced Forth and Smalltalk programmers:
Mops is based on Forth, and its object-oriented features owe a lot to Smalltalk. Experienced programmers in either Smalltalk or Forth should take care not to jump to any conclusions regarding Mops' behavior on the basis of previous experience, and to read carefully through the tutorial.

History

Mops is an object oriented programming system, derived from the Neon language developed by Charles Duff and sold by Kriya, Inc. Kriya discontinued support for Neon, and released the source code into the public domain, retaining only the ownership of the name Neon.

Mops is a complete reimplementation of Neon, with many additional enhancements. It is also in the public domain.

Many portions of this manual were pulled directly from the Mops 4 manual, released in September 2000 in MS Word format. The original HTML release was completed in 2003 by Gnarlodious.
At that time some parts of the material were updated to reflect the advent of OS X, and this will be ongoing, however as a web site the versioning seems irrelevant and so this manual has no version numbers but rather an Updated on entry in this page's title bar.

Mops

The name Mops could well be an acronym for Mike's Object oriented Programming System but since Mike feels the computing world has enough acronyms already, he has taken pity on us. Hence we spell Mops as Mops, not MOPS.

Mike's hope is that over a period of time Mops users will, by sharing their developments, contribute to the ongoing Mops effort. As a one-man, very part time operation, Mike can't hope to singlehandedly compete with all the commercial outfits producing gargantuan bells and whistles encumbered development systems for the Mac, and would be happy to concentrate on the low-level implementation of the Mops nucleus and basic system code.

Please direct corrections, suggestions and criticism regarding this documentation to the PowerMops Users mailing list.