Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site harvard.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!winkler From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler) Newsgroups: net.lang.st80 Subject: Stupid Questions about Berkeley SmallTalk Message-ID: <419@harvard.ARPA> Date: Mon, 4-Mar-85 00:02:43 EST Article-I.D.: harvard.419 Posted: Mon Mar 4 00:02:43 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 5-Mar-85 01:49:51 EST Distribution: net Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard Lines: 36 I'm about to embark on a large programming project on a Sun and I'm trying to decide between using Berkeley SmallTalk and using C. I've never used SmallTalk, but from reading the books it looks easy and fun to pick up. I'm attracted to SmallTalk because the environment looks much nicer than C and dbx. Also, the graphics interface looks easier to use than Sunwindows. However, noone at Harvard uses SmallTalk and I have a few questions: 1) How much slower is Berkely SmallTalk than C on a Sun 2 workstation? 2) Is it stable and fairly bug free? 3) When speed becomes a real issue, will I be able to load different microcode on our Xerox Lisp machines and run my SmallTalk programs there? 4) How easy is it to work with digitized images that have been ftp'd from some other machine? The project I'm doing is an implementation of Valiant's learning protocols applied to handwriting recognition. On the graphics side, we will want to do things like run thinning algorithms on bit images. On the learning side, we will be working with boolean functions (mainly monomials). Lisp is great for working with monomials since you can evaluate p1p2p3...pt with: (and p1 p2 p3 ... pt) How would you represent monomials and more general boolean expressions in SmallTalk? (I told you these were stupid questions!) Thanks in advance. By the way, Apple just released SmallTalk for the Lisa. They had never released it before because it was too slow, but with recent speed improvements it is now (allegedly) reasonably quick. Dan. (winkler@harvard)