Informally specifying Squeak

Allen Wirfs-Brock Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com
Tue Apr 16 16:15:16 UTC 2002


The protocol specifications used in ANSI Smalltalk are based upon work done 
for a Master's thesis by Dave Thomson, now of OTI.  You might want to 
contact Dave (Dave_Thomson at oti.com)to see if you can get a copy of his thesis.

Allen_Wirfs-Brock at Instantiations.com

At 12:19 AM 4/14/2002 -0500, David Faden wrote:
>Hi,
>    I'm considering doing an independent study project and am wondering 
> how I might make the results of the project useful to the Squeak 
> community.  The project would involve revising an informal specification 
> of Smalltalk's key built-in types (based on Little Smalltalk) to fit with 
> Squeak. The present version of the document, "Overview and Specification 
> of the Built-In Types in Little Smalltalk" by Gary Leavens and Yoonsik 
> Cheon, is available at 
> ftp://ftp.cs.iastate.edu/pub/techreports/TR91-22/TR.ps.Z and is cached at 
> http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/89686.html.
>    For example, Boolean's and: method is specified as follows:
>and:     self: Boolean, aBlock: Block -> b: Boolean
>    Requires: aBlock takes no arguments and returns a Boolean.
>    Modifies at most: the objects modified by the execution of aBlock.
>    Ensures: b is false if self is false; otherwise b is the result of 
> evaluating aBlock.
>
>    What could I do to make this work most useful to the Squeak community?
>    How would you suggest presenting the specification? (My first 
> inclination is to insert a method's specification into its comment so as 
> to make the specification available from a browser.)
>    Thank you.
>
>David
>




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