peterr (02/11/83)
The Feb. '83 BYTE has a rather long article on the Apple Lisa, along with an interview with three of the designers. On page 48, one finds some interesting comments concerning the languages supported on the machine: "the...people who designed and implemented [Lisa] have already planned for quite a bit more than they can implement by release date [April]. ...here are some things they were willing to talk about:" "As soon as possible, Apple plans to introduce versions of BASIC, Pascal, and COBOL for the Lisa. The BASIC will be compatible with DEC BASIC Plus (unlike IBM PC BASIC, it will be able to use the extra memory above the first 64K bytes). The first releases of these languages will be plain vanilla versions THAT DON'T INTERACT WITH THE COMPUTER'S SPECIAL FEATURES (E.G. MOUSE CONTROL OF THE CURSOR, WINDOWS, THE "DESKTOP" METAPHOR) (emphasis added), but later versions will probably integrate these languages into the system." "Another language that will be available for the Lisa computer is Smalltalk. ...It is a very "possessive" language that directly controls the machine it is implemented on, so it will probably never be integrated into the Lisa environment -- but then it doesn't need to be." It doesn't? Hmmm. Later on, they also say they will provide information on how to call all their window management, memory management, and file system code, in order to promote third party SW development. So it appears that we will soon have a reasonably available Smalltalk and the debates in this group can take on a new vigour!