Most importantly, class Class was an instance of itself, and class 
Object was a superclass of itself. The "magic of microcode" was what 
allowed those two relations to be circular. The explicit metaclasses 
of Smalltalk-80 really don't do enough work to justify their 
complexity IMNSHO. But, wait until after this summer .....

Cheers,

Alan

At 9:08 PM -0500 3/29/01, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
>On Thursday 29 March 2001 18:42, Stephen Pair wrote:
>>ÝAre there any papers (or code) for Smalltalk-76 on the web? ÝI'm sure
>>Ýthey've been announced before (and wasn't there an implementation of
>>Ýit for Squeak?), but I've forgotten.
>
>This one is great:
>
>http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/St76/Smalltalk76ProgrammingSystem.html
>
>but doesn't mention meta-classes. On page 34 of Alan Kay's "The Early
>History of Smalltalk" paper there is a drawing labeled "Smalltalk-76
>Metaphysics". All classes were instances of the class Class object,
>which was a subclass of the class Object. Little Smalltalk initially
>had the same design (which makes all classes have the exact same set of
>class methods) but has moved to a more Smalltalk-80-like system in
>version 4.
>
>There is a simulation in Squeak of Smalltalk-72, not 76.
>
>-- Jecel