[geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, November 14, 2002 at 18:57:22 (-0500), Joshua D Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.
>
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 06:26:31PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> > Open an old-style "MVC" project and welcome yourself to plain old
> > Smalltalk-80.
> 
> So everything in a smalltalk 80 text should work?

Yes, I think so.  Everything I've looked at is identical except for a
few very low-level details, such as the byte-code assignments and what
exactly is in the virtual machine vs. implemented in smalltalk.

> First, I think your experience with GNU Smalltalk might be a bit dated.
> In recent years it has gained a lot of stuff, like a graphical browser,
> graphical inspector, graphical listener, etc (they look like Tk, but not
> sure if they really are).

Yeah, BLOX.  To quote the manual:  "It is an abstraction on top of the a
platform's native GUI toolkit that is common across all platforms.
Writing to the Blox interface means your GUI based application will be
portable to any platform where Blox is supported."  and there's a a
traditional 4-pane class browser written in Blox.  It is currently Tk
based, but as you mentione supposedly there's also the beginnings of a
GTk+ variant too.

I'm a bit of a purist and I really don't like any of these smalltalks
that have their GUI classes acting as fronts to some underlying graphics
toolkit (and though Tk has done wonders for giving lots of things GUI
capabilities, I really don't like Tk at all).  Of course that puts
VisualAge and most of the other commercial versions in the same state
from my perspective.  Until Squeak came along there was only one true
implementation! ;-)  (ParcPlace, aka VisualWorks)

However the biggest problem I have with GNU Smallktalk, I guess, is that
from the Smalltalk world's perspective, it's _really_ out there (not as
out-there as little-smalltalk, of course :-).  I.e. it's a fringe
implementation.  Squeak is in some ways a fringe implementation too, but
at least in the smalltalk circles around here it's nowhere near as far
out as GST.  The good thing of course is that GST and Squeak are both
more or less ANSI compatible.

Right now version 2.0.3 is what's in NetBSD's pkgsrc and I've been lazy
and have only tried to build it from pkgsrc and it won't build, not even
on i386 and not even with GCC-2.95.3 (which is also in pkgsrc).  I
should probably try harder -- I do want to experiment with the emacs
interface and see if that encourages me to do more coding in smalltalk
-- but I've not had the time yet to fart around with it "by hand" and
get it working....


BTW, released today:

-rw-r--r--    1 1022     101       2918519 Nov 14 23:33 smalltalk-2.0.8.tar.gz


(maybe I should try to update the pkgsrc module...)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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