Squeak versus ANSI Smalltalk

Maloney johnm at wdi.disney.com
Fri Jul 24 20:06:16 UTC 1998


Re:
>What are the Squeak implementation limits listed below with ??? and did I
>list any incorrect values for those I filled in specified by the proposed
>Smalltalk ANSI standard:

I'm sure everyone knows this, but Squeak currently makes no claim of
conforming to the ANSI Smalltalk standard. While I suspect that at least
one branch of Squeak developement will move in that direction,
currently any resemblence between Squeak and ANSI Smalltalk is a
happy accident stemming from Squeak's lineage from the orginal Xerox
Smalltalk-80 rather than due to consious effort. There are any
number of areas, such as filestreams and exception handling, where
Squeak if probably pretty far off the mark.

What this means is that some work is needed to port Smalltalk
code from some other Smalltalk into Squeak. In many cases, this work
is fairly mechanical. I love to see someone start a Swiki page
describing those areas which are NOT so mechanical, such as
exception handling. Recall that the Squeak wiki is now at:

	http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.1

Please send a note to the Squeak list with the URL if you start
such a page. Thanks!

	-- John





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