port Whitewater Actor to Squeak ?

Norman Nunley, Jr. dragon at guild.net
Sun May 5 00:12:51 UTC 2002


Hello,

Have you received any responses yet from the rest of the Squeak community?  I 
know that there have been a few other commercial projects that have been done 
in Squeak in the past few years.  Not all of them made it to market, but many 
of them were proceeding full speed ahead without much difficulty.

A quick search reveals that if you're already working with Act2Cpp, and the 
ReActor project, so you're probably already aware of the following solutions:

1).  You can allocate resources to getting Act2Cpp and ReActor off the ground 
and in a usable state -- you might be able to just hack together the business 
logic with a GUI designed in VC++.
2).  You can spend the time learning smalltalk.  Your best bet, if you're 
only concerned with developing under Win32 is probably Dolphin Smalltalk, 
which has a great deal of windows specific support, and compiles down to a 
shrink wrapped executable.  Alternatively, you could use the Squeak 
environment, which buys you alot of the promise of Java, in that it's write 
once, run the image just about anywhere, though the GUI would not look nearly 
as standard without you using the foreign function interfaces that are 
already present in the squeak core.
3).  Rewrite the whole application in the language of your choice after going 
through a basic requirements gathering and analysis stage to make your 
requirements clear.  You might be able to lose alot of old baggage that way 
in the process.   Depending on the scale of the application, this might be 
the fastest route.

Is the forth that Whitewater used close to the ANSI standard?  Can you just 
generate some backwards compatability words and use a more modern 32 bit 
forth, like winforth?

The porting effort of creating an Actor layer over Squeak would require. 
Using a grammar tool like T-Gen to create a parser to analyze your old Actor 
code, or hand write one, as was done with Act2Cpp. Ideally, you could whip 
together the grammar tool within 2 weeks, if you have the BNF some other 
rigerous language specification.  Creating a mapping from Actor objects to 
Smalltalk is a bit harder, and also depends on how many core objects there 
are in Actor..  I forget if Actor uses multiple inheritance or not.

Donno if the forth code is going to buy you much, unless you want to create a 
virtual machine on top of Squeak, which has been done, though the biggest 
reward for that would be rapid prototyping and feedback.  You might find it 
more interesting to have the Actor code compile to smalltalk, or Squeak 
bytecode.

What's your ability to disclose and share the Whitewater Actor code?  It 
sounds like the code is going to be a bit hairy, and have some assumptions on 
how the archectecture is going to work, and how window messaging works in 
Windows, etc.

Let me know how your search is going,  I remember Actor as being a fun 
language.

Norman Nunley, Jr.

On Thursday 02 May 2002 01:24 pm, you 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 ?
> 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.
>
> Thanks,
> Lynn McGuire



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