Help - Glossary - I - Inspectors
Inspectors are an essential Smalltalk tool. They
are
used to inspect the contents (instance variables) of an active
object. You can
also use it to send messages to an object.
To open an inspector
For example, open a Workspace and type 3@4 into it, then highlight this text and "inspect it". Or make a dictionary and inspect it by opening a Dictionary Inspector on it:
|dict|
dict _ Dictionary new.
dict add: 1->'Einstein'.
dict add: 2->'Goedel'.
dict add: 3->'Von Neumann'.
dict inspect
In either case this will open an inspector window on the object, with the
object's instance variables in a column on the top-left, a variable display area
on the top-right, and a code area on the bottom.
In this code area, you can send
messages to the object. E.g. in the above dictionary you may use e.g. [self at:
2] with Cmd-p or Cmd-i.
See also
Explorer, which is a newer hierarchical alternative to the Inspector.