[self-interest] Re: Announcing mySelf

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

I'm back from vacation and only now reading my December email. I'm
glad to see people having fun with the Self syntax.

As you have already found out, '^' and '|' are NOT valid binary
selectors.

About expressions in parentheses, in Self 1.0 they WERE parsed as
method objects, though they were tagged as "inner methods" as
opposed to the normal "outer methods". So the expression

     3 + ( 4 * 5 )

would result in the following bytecodes:

     push literal ( | | 4 * 5 )
     push literal 3
     send '+'

Just as pushing a block does something special (it actually creates
a block context and pushes that instead), the push inner method
resulted in pushing the result of evaluating that method.

This was eliminated in Self 2.0 or 3.0, and I patched my tinySelf0
parser (in C) to handle this by testing for inner methods that
had exactly one expression and no slots and "expanding" them so
that the following bytecodes would now be generated:

     push literal 5
     push literal 4
     send '*'
     push literal 3
     send '+'

If you write something like

     3 + ( | x=9 | x * 5 )

then tinySelf0 will generate an inner method, but Self 4.0 will
complain that inner methods are no longer supported.

> Hi!
> 
> I've set up a web page for my first version of ``mySelf´´, my Self parser
> and simulator written in Smalltalk! If you like, check out
> 
> http://freeweb.digiweb.com/computers/sma/
> 
> MySelf works both for VisualWorks Smalltalk and Squeak, however the Squeak
> port is really crude. As Squeak's syntax unfortunately doesn't conform with
> the "standard", I had to work around some problems, mainly the fact that
> "_" isn't a valid character in message names. Therefore, I recommend
> VisualWorks NC, which is also _much_ faster.

I'll have a look as soon as I can.

I have downloaded two very interesting programs. Here are the first
lines of the README files for them:

 --------------------------
Ultimardrev-Self is an interpreter of Self 1.0 implemented 
in Smalltalk 2.5 by P.Mulet and F.Rivard in 1991.
 --------------------------
The PROTOTALK platform
for the simulation of prototype-based languages.
 --------------------------

I have never run them as I had no access to a ParcPlace Smalltalk and
didn't want to port them to some other dialect. It would be interesting
to see if the would run on the latest version of VW NC. They don't
seem to be available for FTP, though, so I am wondering if I should
make them available on my site (contacting the authors to ask them
about this will probably be a bit complicated).

> Happy New Year!
> bye
> --
> Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Are you ready to discover the twilight zone?

-- Jecel


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