About GNU Smalltalk/Little Smalltalk, dib@signal.dra.hmg.gb (David Bruce) writes:

Just out of interest, what's the problem: functionality or efficiency?

Well, both are blue-book style interpreters written in C, in GNU Smalltalk's case, it is almost a direct translation from the blue book, for example the bytecode set is the same, which is not true for Little Smalltalk. Gnu Smalltalk includes all the base collection classes, and there is apparently an interface in the works, but this has been delayed. Within a year or so, you may be able to describe Gnu as a good Smalltalk circa 1985 :-)

Brook Conner dbc@cs.brown.edu writes:

Both are, as I recall, hopelessly cut down. GNU Smalltalk includes an interface to the X Protocol but nothing more in terms of environment. Last I heard, Little Smalltalk was missing important things like instance variables :-)

Little Smalltalk is based on a different bytecode. It also interprets cascades differently, and objects can have either named or indexed instance variables --- more minimal even than Self. (Actually, if you use both they overlay each other).

dib@signal.dra.hmg.gb (David Bruce) writes:

This raises the following question (for instructors, I guess): how slow a system could one `get away with'?

Well, we use Tcl here *lots*, and the Kamin interpreters, neither of which are fast. It depends what you're doing. If you kept the Self language, but added a nice UI layer implemented in C(++), you could compete with things like Tcl. Two languages which have done this, quoting Self as an influence, are VisualObliq and NewtonScript.

jecel@lsi.usp.br (Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.) writes:

But is you had a book, it would make Self more "respectable" in the eyes of many educators.

A book is a nice idea - Tcl has one, Modula-3 has several, even Lisp-Stat has one. Unfortunately I'm rather busy at the moment :-)

James