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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!ihnp4!arizona!budd
From: budd@arizona.UUCP (tim budd)
Newsgroups: net.lang.st80
Subject: what is smalltalk?
Message-ID: <15756@arizona.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Sep-84 18:34:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: arizona.15756
Posted: Fri Sep 21 18:34:53 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 21:44:07 EDT
Organization: Dept of CS, U of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 38

this is not a line of text
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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.