I would recommend starting with the paper "Back to the Future: The Story
of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself" by Dan Ingalls, Ted
Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, and Alan Kay - which outlines the
primary differences between Squeak's interpreter and the classic
interpreter presented in the BlueBook implementation chapters - and then
fill in the details with these chapters -- I have all of this at my
site: http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/

For the generational GC used in Squeak, take a look at "A Real Time
Garbage Collector Based On The Lifetimes of Objects" by Henry Lieberman
and Carl Hewitt,Communications of the ACM, June 1983:
http://lieber.www.media.mit.edu/people/lieber/Lieberary/GC/GC.html

There is also a nice set of slides Ian Piumarta made for a talk a while
back, which I no longer seem to have a link for, but can send you a copy
if you would like (~260KB) - only the first third or so is about the
present VM, but it should be of interest.

The OOPSLA '99 VM Workshop also included some papers that should be
useful: http://www.squeak.org/oopsla99_vmworkshop/

-- Dwight 

> "Michael T. Nygard" wrote:
> 
> What's the best way to start learning the design and construction of
> the interpreter?  I think it will be difficult to just start reading
> the methods to form a gestalt understanding.
> 
> Thanks,
> --Michael T. Nygard
>