kinner@wsucshp.UUCP (02/05/87)
A while back someone asked about the Little Smalltalk system, available for the Amiga on Fish Disk 37. Little Smalltalk was originally written for Unix by Timothy A. Budd, currently at Oregon State. It is a line- oriented version of Smalltalk, ideal for people who are interested in learning the Smalltalk language without all the "graphexcess baggage". While there are a number of Smalltalk features missing, I found it to be in many ways an improvement, in line with the philosophy that smaller is better. For example there are no Metaclasses. There are classes for Bag, Set, Dictionary, File, Array, String, etc. as found in Smalltalk-80, classes which support quasi-concurrency (Process and Semaphore), plus a few new ones (Interval and ByteArray). The system allows escape to your favorite editor where class descrip- tions can be edited and new ones created. Best of all, the system comes with complete source for the interpreter in C. Budd has jus written a book entitled "A Little Smalltalk", published by Addison-Wesley. Further information, including a newsletter, is available from Smalltalk Distribution Department of Computer Science Oregon State University Corvallis Oregon 97331
johnson@uiucdcsp.UUCP (02/10/87)
Actually, Interval and ByteArray are in Smalltalk-80, too. If you are even mildly interested in Little Smalltalk then you should get the book by Budd. This is a great book (and a good system) for those who like to see how a system is implemented. It has great potential for expansion, since you can write your own classes to do graphics on your machine. The book would probably serve well in a course that introduces not-very-advanced students to language implementation. Since "A Little Smalltalk" is paperback, it shouldn't be too expensive, but I don't recall the exact price, and computer books often seem overpriced.