>
> For example, one of the people who responded to the blog message said
> "A program is text".  But in Smalltalk, a program is not text, it is
> objects.  ....Smalltalk is objects all
> the way down.....We live in an
> "image", which is an executing program.  We modify our applications in
> the middle of their execution.  There is no "main".  When we write a
> program, we are not just reusing some code that is thirty years old,
> we are making it by modifying a program that started executing thrity
> years ago and that has been changed by thousands of people ever since.
>

And, the act of modifying the executing program is done by nothing more 
than sending messages to the executing objects in this same program that 
started executing thirty years ago.

Which I would argue makes even the concept of "source code" an ambiguous 
concept in Smalltalk.

What is Smalltalk source code? 

An argument could be made for defining Smalltalk "source code" as a 
transcript of the messages sent by the programmer (i.e., the contents of 
the changes file).  This wouldn't be a widely accepted definition, but 
never-the-less, I believe a good argument could be made for defining it 
this way.

Another argument could be made for defining Smalltalk "source code" as 
the string (text) result of asking each of the contents of the method 
dictionaries of the classes to print themselves.  This would be a more 
popularly accepted definition, but why?  Why would this definition be 
any more correct than the previous one?

I would argue that there really is no "source code".  At best, you can 
ask the system to recreate a sequence of message sends that you hope, 
when replayed, with transform the internal state of the executing 
program from one known state into another known state that you need and 
want.  That's what a file-out is.  It is a synthesized sequence of 
message sends, synthesized by the executing Smalltalk system, in a hope 
that it can be replayed by yet another Smalltalk system to transform it 
into what you want.

Thus, I would argue that Smalltalk really doesn't have source code.  It 
has message sends, sent to live objects.  And I like it just fine that 
way, thank you.

If you choose to define "source code" as a printed sequential list of 
some known subset of message sends that can later be replayed, then you 
can argue that Smalltalk has source code.

Nevin