Obfuscated Self Date: Mon, 25 Jul 94 11:05:22 EST From: jecel at lsi.usp.br (Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.)

[David Bruce]

   A few people have tried to convince me to create a simple PC based
   implementation of Self and include it for free in a book for novices
   to spread out the word :-). I don't know if it is a good idea - Little
   Smalltalk and GNU Smalltalk leave many people with a bad impression
   of the language.

   - Jecel

Just out of interest, what's the problem: functionality or efficiency?
I'm not so familiar with {Little,GNU} Smalltalk; are they hopelessly
`cut-down' versions of the real thing (cf. microemacs :-)), or just
very very slow?

I know that an efficient implementation of Self is decidedly non-trivial,
but surely the point of the language is that it is simple and so could be
implemented naively (e.g., as an interpreter) without an enormous effort
(though not necessarily by a novice!).

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

    David Bruce
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