oldest bits in Squeak?
Jecel Assumpcao Jr
jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Feb 17 22:52:31 UTC 2004
On Tuesday 17 February 2004 18:13, Lex Spoon wrote:
> How old are the oldest bits in Squeak? When was the last time an
> image was created from scratch, as opposed to being modified from a
> previous version? I know this idea has gone around before, but I
> want to double check.
On page 25 of the "green book", Dan Ingalls wrote:
This truly marked the beginning of a new era: there are many
bits in the Smalltalk-80 release of today which are copies of
those bits first cloned in 1977.
and on the previous page:
While Smalltalk-72 and -74 were used as long-lived evolving
images, the systems as released were always generated from
scratch, by reading a set of system definitions into a bootstrap
kernel. With the Smalltalk-76 system, we took a bold step and
opted to ignore support for system generation. The system was
built in two parts: a Virtual Machine was written in microcode
and machine code, and a virtual image was cross-compiled from
a simulation done in Smalltalk-74.
> I would like to claim that every Squeak image is a suspended program
> that has been running since 19__, which is a pretty good record of
> software reuse! It also can make curly-brace people rethink the idea
> of restarting their program from scratch whenever they make a tiny
> change.
At least 1977.
-- Jecel
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|