Peter --

At 10:08 AM +0100 4/4/01, Peter Crowther wrote:
>  > From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay at disney.com]
>>  That is right, I seem to remember that it did (as its remoter
>>  ancestor LISP used to (and perhaps still does)).
>
>It still does, with a slightly different rule --- anything except nil is
>true.  Caused me no end of hassle recently when I was translating some LISP
>code into something faster but less readable.  At least Smalltalk actually
>*has* booleans.
>
>Alan, were you ever a Loads-of-Irritating-Superfluous-Parentheses
>programmer, because your use of nested parentheses would seem to imply it.

heh, heh. That was for Richard's benefit. No, but I was a very 
interested LISP code reader (especially the metacode) in the late 
sixties. Some of Smalltalk's best ideas were adaptations of various 
late binding ideas first put in LISP.

Cheers,

Alan