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From: hmm@laura.UUCP (Martin Mosner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: SMALLTALK on Atari - How about Amiga?
Message-ID: <70@laura.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 19-Jul-87 12:46:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: laura.70
Posted: Sun Jul 19 12:46:22 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jul-87 20:44:45 EDT
References: <231@philtis.UUCP> <122700005@exunido.UUCP> <793@unicus.UUCP>
Reply-To: hmm@unido.UUCP (Hans-Martin Mosner)
Organization: University of Dortmund, W-Germany
Lines: 38

In article <793@unicus.UUCP> craig@unicus.UUCP (Craig D. Hubley) writes:
>
>Since there's a PD Smalltalk for Atari, I wonder if there's a similar
>implementation for the Amiga, or at least sources in some common language
>such as C available.  Any word from those who ported the Atari version?

The Little Smalltalk system is written in C, as far as I know.  I have
seen it on an Amiga at the Hannover fair where we showed our port, and
I was not so impressed.  I did not have the time to dig into it, though.
The guy at the Commodore booth who showed it to me did not have a manual,
so I could not examine the predefined classes & methods.  But it looked
as if there were some nice things missing, like the Fraction & LargeInteger
classes.  I don't remember how complete the Collection classes were.

ParcPlace Systems Smalltalk-80 (the real thing) could be ported to the
Amiga quite easily, though (about 1 week to get a first version running).
I don't know if it's in the works somewhere.
>
>With hardware graphics support, a blitter, etc., plus the ability to support
>8 meg of RAM or so, the Amiga would make a great low-end Smalltalk engine.

Yup, but Little Smalltalk did not use all that fancy stuff.  Text only...
>
>With 640x400 32-levels-of-grayscale (or color, if you can handle the flicker
>and the bucks) support on the Amiga 500, one ought finally to be able to
>wean the home hackers off of BASIC (icch).  
You should try to contact Professor Timothy Budd, who is the author
of Little Smalltalk.  I think if someone puts some work into a windowing
interface and adds the missing classes, it could be a nice system.
I don't know Mr. Budds address, but as far as I know, he's at the
University of Arizona.  Good luck !

Disclaimer:  All I know about Little Smalltalk is from the 10-minute
experience at the Hannover fair.  It's quite possible that the system
is far more complete by now...

	Hans-Martin Mosner  
	University of Dortmund
D