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From: trow@uw-june (Jay Trow)
Newsgroups: net.lang.st80
Subject: Re: what is smalltalk?
Message-ID: <1792@uw-june>
Date: Wed, 26-Sep-84 23:43:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-june.1792
Posted: Wed Sep 26 23:43:47 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 02:22:45 EDT
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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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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