4 ms·

Thanks for that explanation! Is there any form of sandboxing in Pharo VMs that would prevent accidental side effects like the hard drive reformatting?

• tom_mellior 6y ago
  Not as far as I know. In fact, the system prides itself on allowing you to modify everything in it. One striking demo I saw once a few years ago (so details are a bit hazy) involved the become: message. This is a special operation for swapping references around. "X become: Y" has the effect of everything that previously referred to X to now refer to Y, and everything that previously referred to Y to refer to X. So the demo was to execute something like: White become: Black. which immediately switched all white pixels to black and vice versa. I think the person giving the demo even demonstrated True become: False. though that made the VM unusable pretty much immediately IIRC.