Paradigm shift

With recent releases, and coming version 11.03, Dr. Geo II is becoming more and more an integrated environment to teach or to learn interactively software programming within a geometry and math context.

Indeed, thanks to its API, it is possible to add scripts - small pieces of Pharo code - to interactive geometry sketches. Moreover one can also describe sketches entirely in Pharo source code. In previous post I already presented thus features, there are now fully explained in the Dr. Geo user guide (by the way volunteers to translate this guide in other languages are welcome and can contact me at hilaire@drgeo.eu).

To ease the writing of code, Dr. Geo II now comes with a collection of developer tools:

• Workspace, a text editor to write or to paste Pharo code and to compile and execute it. When executing this code, it is possible to execute in step-by-step mode through the debugger or to profile its execution time.
• Debugger, to run step by step a Pharo code describing a sketch. The Debugger can be called explicitly with the self halt. statement.
• Inspector, to examine and to modify the state of a specific object. Each object can be explicitly inspected by sending the message inspect, for example: segment inspect.
• Class Browser, to examine and to modify the Dr. Geo II source code from Dr. Geo II itself.
• Finder, to search and to find methods with a given behavior.

The screen shot below shows these tools in a Dr. Geo II session. Of course such session can be saved and restored later (including debugging phase):