A Proposal for Project Layers
Dan Ingalls
Dan.Ingalls at disney.com
Tue Nov 16 06:19:10 UTC 1999
>David -
>
>A fresh perspective! I don't see why we couldn't do this, but now is certainly the time to make sure it would be possible. I need to think some more before proposing how to do it.
OK. I just thought some more about it. Normally we have an open access path somewhat like the following...
Package
SmalltalkPackage
SoundPackage
where Package defines the semantics of a layer and each level below adds some bindings and some export methods. In particular the SmalltalkPackage level "is" the Smalltalk dictionary with all the kernel classes like Object, Collection, etc.
I believe your needs would be fairly well served simply by another direct descendent of the relatively abstract Package class
Package
MinimalTalkPackage
MinimalSoundPackage
I don't see any reason you couldn't define a class Object in the MinimalTalk package, with a subclass Collection, and continue on defining other subclasses of it with full support of the existing system, but with the emergent structure being pretty much self-referent. When it came time to run things, there would be some problems with the primitve objects known to the VM, but I bet you could get pretty far with a special version of the Context stepping simulator. When that worked, then a carefully crafted trip through the SystemTracer should give you an image that would run with the current VM.
- Dan
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|