msc (04/01/83)
There have recently been several people asking what Smalltalk
is and what documents are available about it. I thought I'd
try to provide some light.
What is Smalltalk?
Smalltalk is an interactive object-oriented programming
environment developed by the Learning Resources Group at Xerox
PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre). It runs on Alto, Doplhin
and some other Xerox computer systems. Xerox has only recently
started selling licences for the software.
The total Smalltalk programming environment requires some
fairly powerful hardware to give adequate perfomrance. For
this reason there is some interest in Smalltalk like (or
even Smalltalk itself) languages running in some other
environment. For example we have a C-pre-processor called
oopc which allows us to program Smalltalk methods in C. (A
method is the Smalltalk equivalent of a function.)
Documentation
Byte Magazine Smalltalk issue, August 1981.
Probably the most complete, publicly available, set of
information about Smalltalk. This issue was way way above
the head of the average Byte reader.
"Introductory Material for SmallTalk" by Wayne T. Wilner.
I think this is a Xerox document, I'm not sure. If
you contact Xerox PARC they can probably help with
additional documents.
"The Object-oriented Pre-Compiler" by Brad Cox
SIGPLAN notices, V18, #1, January 1983
This describes oopc. There is also a paper in the
proceedings from the Boston Usenix Conference in July
1982.
The following Intel documents contain some discussion about
object-oriented programming concepts.
"Introduction to the iAPX432 Architecture" Intel Manual #171821-001.
"iAPX432 General Data processor, Architecture Reference Manual"
by Paul Tyner. Intel Manual #171860-001.
Mark Callow
...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!qubix!msc
...ittvax!qubix!msc
decwrl!qubix!msc@Berkeley.ARPA