[Cuis-dev] Clicking the 'collapse' halo handle brings up the debugger

[Pat Foley]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021, 2:15 PM Hernan Wilkinson via Cuis-dev <
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:

> I use the halos when teaching for the students to see a way to get to the
> code or objects from the UI. It is very useful when you are learning how
> things work
>

I'm really glad you said this, Hernan, because something about this feels
right, but it raises some relevant questions.

What is the object? If it's the thing on the screen, then halos provide a
way of interacting with the object. If the thing on screen is a
presentation of the "real" object, then halos can be looked at as a way of
interacting with the presentation, or (not exclusively) as a simulation of
interacting with the object, and that simulation is also presented in a
certain way.

When the objects are presented to us as text, we know to think of that as a
representation of the "real" object, which is some value stored in memory.
When the object is a shape or something similar, things get hazy.

So what is a Morph? Is it a thing drawn on screen (even if it has other
things drawn on top of it, so maybe not visible at the moment)? Or is it
what the the thing drawn on screen represents, an abstract
thing-that-could-be-drawn-on-screen-in-a-canonical-way? (What is a Morph
that has been collapsed? What is a Morph that hasn't been drawn yet? Can
they have halos? What would undrawn halos on an undrawn Morph be for?)
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