Hi!

Perhaps it's not the best place to ask, but as a lot of first-time
Smalltalk ers including the inventors of Smalltalk theirselves are
listening, I'd like to ask some questions regarding Smalltalk-76.  I got a
photocopy of an old article called "The Smalltalk-76 Programming System,
Design and Implementation" (Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of
Prog. Lang.) which was very interesting to read. I don't know the date of
publishing, but I guess it was between 1977 and 1979.

I'd like to gather more information about this system. Everything, pointers
to other articles, electronically available documents, a formal language
description or even parts of the source code would be welcome.

>From the paper, I could already get a first impression of the 76 flavor of
Smalltalk, and it's very interesting to compare it with ST-80.   In ST-76,
I like the way how writing accessing methods are specified and how array
access had been implemented. IMHO that's more elegant that using at: and
at:put: nowaday. Perhaps the syntax of ST-80 has been simplified too much.
I wonder whether ST-76 already featured block closures. Where there
additional features which are not detailed in the paper and why where they
dropped in ST-80?  What has been added in ST-80 beyond meta classes (and
perhaps block closures).


Thanks in advance,
bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Are you ready to discover the twilight zone?