"Lynn McGuire" <winsim at winsim.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a commerical application that is partly coded in the old
> Whitewater Actor language.  I am looking for a Win32 place to 
> port the Actor code to.  The Actor programming environment is
> a Win16 application and is a pure OOP, typeless, GC'd language 
> that is a descendent of Smalltalk and Pascal (and maybe a few 
> others) with a Smalltalk like class library.  Whitewater sold 
> Actor to Symantec in 1992 and Actor was allowed to die on 
> the vine.  There are still quite a few users of Actor since it was 
> such a good environment.
> 
> Questions:
> 1. Can Squeak be used to produce a commercial product ?

IMHO Yes. But you need to be more specific in your question. What do you
need?

For example do you need to build Win32 UIs? In that case you might be
better off with Dolphin Smalltalk.
Currently there is nothing really available for building UIs using an
external library (like win32, gtk+, Qt, Motif etc) in Squeak.
Or do you need multimedia, interactive graphics, networking, ultra
crossplatform? Squeak has all that and more.

But as UI-kit Morphic might of course fit! It depends on your
application. Morphic is much nicer in all the technical aspects (I
think) but lacks in "looks" and "missing widgets". But soon I think the
community has the muscles to remedy that and come up with a set of nice
looking widgets.

> 2. Would anyone know if porting Actor on top of Squeak 
>     might be feasible ?  How to start such an effort ?  I do have
>     the complete source code for Actor including the Win16 
>     assembly for the forth kernel.

Hmmm. I know too little about Actor to tell. But an alternative would
perhaps be to write an Actor->Squeak converter? One advantage of such an
approach would be (I am guessing):

1. In moving over the code to a Smalltalk dialect like Squeak you can
more easily move to any of the other Smalltalks.
2. Having your app directly "on top" of Squeak means that you don't need
to maintain an Actor-layer.

regards, Göran

PS. A couple of years ago I was in a small project where we built a
"BASIC"-like clone interpreter on top of VisualWorks together with some
neat tools, among other things we built a terminal-screen-forms->VW
UI-converter which actually converted those ugly terminal forms into
pretty nice VW UIs which then could be further massaged using VW. The
tool could autoconvert the old systems into a VW+Oracle combo and then
you could develop the system further using either VW Smalltalk or the
"BASIC"-clone. DS

> Thanks,
> Lynn McGuire

regards, Göran