Any discussion of what is Smalltalk and what isn't can't get very far
without first clearly defining a few things. Are we assuming that
"Smalltalk" and "Smalltalk-80" are equivalent? Does the ANSI Smalltalk
standard play any role in the discussion?

Even if we make our assumptions clear, there is still a lot of
subjectivity involved. Many people consider Scheme to be a different
language than Lisp, but its creators do not and the famous "Structure
and Interpretation of Computer Programs" course uses the name "Lisp"
exclusively except for one initial note saying that the Lisp they use is
Scheme. On the other hand, everybody can easily agree that Scheme is not
a Common Lisp.

It seems silly to have a definition of "Smalltalk" that would exclude
Smalltalk-72 to Smalltalk-76, and yet Smalltalk-72 is more different
from what we have now than NewSpeak (which I would not call a
Smalltalk). So perhaps we should have such a definition. On the other
hand, at one point I got tired of people considering Self to be a
different language so I renamed my project from Self/R to Neo Smalltalk.
In the Self 4.0 "images" that included Mario Wolczko's patches you could
file in all of the GNU Smalltalk libraries and they would work
perfectly.

-- Jecel