tim (03/31/83)
I can't find anything on Smalltalk in our local library. Would someone please post (or mail to me) a brief des- cription of the language, the sort of task it is good for, whether it is functional, object-oriented, classical, or whatever, and so on? You will have my undying gratitude. (Some pointers to literature would be nice as well.) Tim Maroney decvax!duke!unc!tim
budd@arizona.UUCP (tim budd) (09/22/84)
this is not a line of text -------------------------- What is smalltalk? is it the syntax of the language described in the blue book? the set of classes described there? do you need a mouse to have something you can call smalltalk? how about the browser? editor? etc etc. Here is a for instance: Last year I became interested in the language, but did not have access to any type of machine that could run the ze-rocks stuff. So I sat down and wrote my own system (which I call ``Little Smalltalk''). My system sits on top of unix, using, for example, the unix editors accessed through ``system'' rather then writing a special editor specifically for smalltalk. The syntax accepted by my system is the same as that described in the blue book (well, since I get the entire class description at one time I had to insert a few vertical bars here and there to separate things). The standard classes are similar, although not always identical to those described in the blue book (symbols are a subclass of object, not of string, dictionarys are a subclass of collection, not of set, and of course there are a lot of classes corresponding to internals that are different or nonexistent in my version). my version is geared toward ascii terminals, does not require mice or bitmaps or anything else fancy. And of course the underlying system is entirely different, different bytecodes and so on. Now, the question is: is this a smalltalk implementation? or is it an implementation of a smalltalk-like-language, or just some weird clyde that I've dreamed up. what are peoples opinions? --tim budd, the university of arizona ..|arizona|budd btw: the system is in sorta zeta release now, however I have a group of about a dozen students trying to shake the bugs out of it. by the end of the term we should have something sufficiently bug free to distribute, if anybody is interested.
trow@uw-june (Jay Trow) (09/27/84)
Forwarded from Smalltalk80Interest^@Xerox
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Date: Tue, 25 Sep 84 14:57:35 PDT
Subject: Re: What is Smalltalk?
To: arizona!budd@ucb-vax.arpa
cc: Bay, Smalltalk80Interest^
What is Smalltalk? Good question. Those of us who have worked on various
Smalltalk systems at PARC have pondered just that question from time to time
and the answer is not simple.
To ask another question, why does it matter? And to answer my own question,
it's so that you can make a brief description that others will correctly
understand. From this point of view, the way to answer your question ("is
this a smalltalk implementation?") is to ask "what will people think it is
when I say it is a smalltalk implementation?". The answer to this question
is also, of course, open to debate. My personal opinion is that some people
might reasonably assume that a "smalltalk implementation" had a particular
type of user interface. So perhaps the slightly longer phrase, "a smalltalk
implementation geared toward ascii terminals" would convey a more accurate
picture. Depending on what your interface is like, the phrase "smalltalk
programming language" might be just as accurate with fewer words (since it
is apparently the language syntax that is most similar to other things called
"Smalltalk").
I first confronted the question of what Smalltalk is when the Rosetta system
was announced. Part of the reason I was concerned about them calling their
system Smalltalk was my own fault. Since we had not published very much about
what we meant by "Smalltalk", we were worried that when people saw the Rosetta
system, they would think that it is what we had been talking about (and it
wasn't). The folks at Rosetta were sympathetic to this concern and henceforth
called their system "Rosetta Smalltalk". As a result of this experience, and
of the fact that "what is Smalltalk?" is a hard question to answer, we decided
to trademark "Smalltalk-80". So if you call something "Smalltalk-80" or
"Xerox Smalltalk", it should be precisely the system we developed (and, yes,
it will need a bitmap and a mouse).
All this aside, I would be interested in hearing more about your "entirely
different" underlying system, what are your bytecodes and why did you choose
them?
If you would like to publish something about your system in the Smalltalk
newsletter that we distribute, or if you would just like to receive the
newsletter, you can contact
Duane Bay
Xerox PARC
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, California 94304
Dave Robson, former resident of tucson
robson@xerox.arpa
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