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Questions tagged [smalltalk]

Smalltalk is an object-oriented programming language.

Smalltalk is an object-oriented programming language. For more details, refer smalltalk tag wiki at Stack Overflow.

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What did Alan Kay mean by "assignment" in The Early History of Smalltalk?

I have been reading The Early History of Smalltalk and there are a few mentions of "assignment" which make me question my understanding of its meaning: Though OOP came from many motivations, two were central. The large scale one was to find a…
Olivier Dagenais
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What uses does Smalltalk’s ‘become:’ have?

The become: message in Smalltalk causes one object to change into another, affecting all references to it. What uses does this language feature have? Does it get used in real code? Is it just a curiosity? Is it considered a good/bad practice to use…
dpk
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What's the relationship between meta-circular interpreters, virtual machines and increased performance?

I've read about meta-circular interpreters on the web (including SICP) and I've looked into the code of some implementations (such as PyPy and Narcissus). I've read quite a bit about two languages which made great use of metacircular evaluation,…
Gomi
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How did people write end-user software in Smalltalk?

There is something I've never understood about Smalltalk, since reading about it in a book when I was a child, tho' I have never used it "in anger". I know that it is turtles-all-the-way-down, that you can break into the program at any time, inspect…
Gaius
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Relationship between a mixin and its master invokation

I haven't studied Smalltalk or Strongtalk and am just trying to get an overview of the semantics of interfaces and polymorphism in O/O languages, particularly Dart. In the 2002 paper titled Mixins in Strongtalk, there is the following paragraph in…
Tom Russell
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How does whileTrue: works in Smalltalk?

I want to know how whileTrue: works. I searched the implementation that is in BlockClosure: whileTrue: aBlock ^ [self value] whileTrue: [aBlock value] And another implementation with no parameter: whileTrue ^ [self value] whileTrue:…
Lucas Gabriel Sánchez
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Is there an IDE for python that creates the same kind of reflective environment that Smalltalk provides?

As anyone who has used Smalltalk knows, one of the main benefits (other than a late-bound language that discourages many poor practices), is that the system is totally transparent and reflective, which makes understanding APIs and existing code…
Marcin
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Is there a common denominator of all Smalltalk implementations?

In most languages, there is standard libraries. And this is foundation, common denominator of them. Applications can be written with guarantee of the denominator. What's the core of Smalltalk?
Eonil
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Where is Smalltalk-80 best used?

I want to know in which applications/programming domain are most suitable for Smalltalk. Could anyone please provide me some useful links that could answer my query? Through googling I learned that some companies use it for: logistics and foreign…
njay
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data maintenance/migrations in image based sytems

Web applications usually have a database. The code and the database work hand in hand together. Therefore Frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django create migration files Sure there are also servers written in Self or Smalltalk or other image-based…
User
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Is it correct to say "send a message to an object" in Java?

In Smalltalk we say "send a message to an object", but is it also correct to say "send a message to an object" in Java, or is it only correct in Java to say "call a method of an object"?
Steve
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What happened to VM based deployments?

Watched some MountainWest RubyConf 2014 talks and noticed an interesting theme. Many dynamic programming environments back in the old days used to be self-contained VM images, e.g. SmallTalk, GemStone/S. One could checkpoint, modify, and ship these…
user128670
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Are there similarities between operating system kernels and programming language kernels?

I know very little about Smalltalk but I noticed that there's a frequent mention of the "kernel". Dan Ingalls prime maintainer of several implementations of Smalltalk also worked on a Javascript environment called "Lively Kernel" and in Peter…
rahmu
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How to get hold of the existing code base/projects in squeaksource.com?

I am very new to smalltalk. And I am currently trying to wrap my head around GNU smalltalk (pharo environment). Upon browsing through the introductory session of pharo by example, I came to know that there is a lot of code base in the squeaksource…
Vamsi Emani
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Were method cascades ever considered for C#?

Smalltalk supports a syntax feature called "message cascades". Cascades are being adopted by the Dart Programming language. As far as I know, C# doesn't support this. Were they ever considered during the design of the language? Is it conceivable…
dharmatech
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