Mark Derricutt

I'm sitting here having one of those "enlightened" moments when you suddenly grok the power of something, in this case its closures/blocks. I've been loving the power and flexibility Smalltalk's blocks provide for sometime now, and whilst Java's anonymous inner classes provide some similar functionality, they're hardly as clean. I had some code which, when let loose to a customer suddenly started to crawl (reading through large distributed global address lists from Outlook, via its - slow - object model , the task was to add a progress display around the process - initially my mind went "eeep" and cowering in fear at having to grok Dolphin's threading models and how they intermix with Windows threads, but then I had a memory "wait, I've seen funky progress bars here before, maybe someones already done the dirty for me" - so I open the class browser and search for "P... (more)