Excuse the pedantry, but  can't stop myself from correcting a little
of the history contained within your message - not to 'tell you off' but
to try to make sure incorrectness is quashed asap.

> My first "useful" Smalltalk application was written in Visual Smalltalk V3.11 (by: ParkPlace Digitalk - Now ObjectShare).
VS was created by Digitalk.
VisualWorks was the ParcPlace product that descended directly from the
PARC Smalltalk system (making it a cousin of Squeak) and I think it
probably preceeded VS by some time - although it was known as
ObjectWorks back then.
ParcPlace and Digitalk merged to form ParcPlace-Digitalk, later named
ObjectShare after the management had managed to pollute the name so
badly that people didn't want to do business with them.
VS might well have been dropped from the product line (though I thought
I saw something about it being available for free in some form?) but VW
is not its 'replacement'.
VW is still available, and indeed thriving after years of poor
management. You can download it for free non-commercial usage from
www.parcplace.com 


> I love the Smalltalk paradigm. It is so fast and powerful. But unfortunately no one has set a useable standard of the language for developers.
Well, there is an ISO standard, which is more than many so-called
competitor languages can claim.

> Most needed would be a Smalltalk to C translator for the end-user
 development extension classes, which would be capable of handling
 several of the most common hardware platforms. This translator would
 need to be high-level buffered from specific hardware/OS requirements
 much as Smalltalk uses a few primitives to buffer the hardware/OS
 specifics from the programmer.

What? Why would one want to translate to C in any general sense? Squeak
can take SLang (see Andy Greenbergs chapter in the Squeak book
(http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/) on the subject) which is used
to produce the bulk of the VM and plugins from within the image. If you
translate to C you will either lose the dynamic nature of the system or
have to implement message sending etc within the C code. The latter
just means you have another VM in there, probably not as well written as
the 'real' VM.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Always in the right place, but at the wrong time.