Thanks Bert,
A fun read:))
Lou
On Tue, 2 Oct 2012 12:53:00 +0200, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
Alan Kay about the Fall of 1972:
=================== In Sept. within a few weeks of each other, two bets happened. [...] One day, in a typical PARC hallway bullsession, Ted Kaehler, Dan Ingalls, and I were standing around talking about programming languages. The subject of power came up and the two of them wondered how large a language one would have to make to get great power. With as much panache as I could muster, I asserted that you could define the most powerful language in the world in a page of code. They said, Put up or shut up. [...] It turned out to be more difficult than I had first thought for three reasons. First, I wanted the program to be more like McCarthys second non-recursive interpreter--the one implemented as a loop that tried to resemble the original 709 implementation of Steve Russell as much as possible. It was more real. Second, the intertwining of the parsing with message receipt--the evaluation of parameters which was handled separately in LISP--required that my object-oriented interpreter re-enter itself sooner (in fact, much sooner) than LISP required. And, finally, I was still not clear how send and receive should work with each other.
The first few versions had flaws that were soundly criticized by the group. But by morning 8 or so, a version appeared that seemed to work [...] The major differences from the official Smalltalk-72 of a little bit later were that in the first version symbols were byte-coded and the receiving of return of return-values from a send was symmetric-i.e. receipt could be like parameter binding-this was particular useful for the return of multiple values. For various reasons, this was abandoned in favor of a more expression-oriented functional return style.
Of course, I had gone to considerable pains to avoid doing any real work for the bet, but I felt I had proved my point. This had been an interesting holiday from our official iconic programming pursuits, and I thought that would be the end of it. Much to my surprise, only a few days later, Dan Ingalls showed me the scheme working on the NOVA. He had coded it up (in BASIC!), added a lot of details, such as a token scanner, a list maker, etc., and there it was-running. As he liked to say: You just do it and its done.
It evaluated 3 + 4 v_e_r_y s_l_o_w_l_y (it was glacial, as Butler liked to say) but the answer always came out 7. Well, there was nothing to do but keep going. Dan loved to bootstrap on a system that always ran, and over the next ten years he made at least 80 major releases of various flavors of Smalltalk.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk
- Bert -
----------------------------------------------------------- Louis LaBrunda Keystone Software Corp. SkypeMe callto://PhotonDemon mailto:Lou@Keystone-Software.com http://www.Keystone-Software.com