Hypercard in Squeak?

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Sun May 28 15:34:38 UTC 2000


Lawson --

This has been a long standing plan.
     Dan Ingalls has done just what you suggest with Squeak syntax = a
pretty darn good first pass at this. It should already be lurking in the
updates, or will be very soon.

Cheers,

Alan

-----

At 2:03 AM -0800 5/28/00, Lawson English wrote:
>On Fri, May 26, 2000 12:13 PM, Alan Kay <mailto:Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:
>>Dave --
>>
>>We want something more like "Hypercard 2000" or "what Hypercard should
>have
>>been".
>>
>>Hypercard had some nifty ideas (and quite a few of them are lurking in
>>Morphic Squeak -- for example, have you noticed that the center menu of a
>>bookmorph allows you to search for any string fragment on all of the pages
>>of the bookmorph? -- that a bookmorph can be sent to a server and shared,
>>but still searched via the proxy that is downloaded to get pages on
>demand?
>>-- that you can now do the same kinds of things with whole projects? ....
>>Etc.).
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Alan
>
>Of course, it all depends on what you're trying to do. My own personal
>belief is that Smalltalk's syntax is still too geekish for the average
>end-user and a more natural-language syntax ala HyperTalk or AppleScript is
>better, at least for the beginner.
>
>I know that is a delicate and controversial religious issue, but I'm in
>favor (as I've said before) of foreign syntaxes being added *on top of*
>Smalltalk, rather than changing Smalltalk itself.
>
>Perhaps a human language mapping of Smalltalk could be created that could
>be translated to a sub-set of the full Smalltalk language.
>
>IOW, you script your Squeak stack using the humanesque syntax, which gets
>translated directly into Squeak and then compiled into the standard Squeak
>VM byte code. The original script is stored as-is, and re-compiled whenever
>the scripting window is closed, if it's been changed. If you want to drop
>down into Smalltalk inside the scripting window for extra power, you can do
>so, as long as you mark the ST code as  standard Smalltalk, so the script
>parser doesn't croak on it.
>
>Done right, you could do what they tried to do with AppleScript: create a
>multi-human-language scripting platform where the human varients translate
>into the same underlying code.
>
>Of course, this should be combined with the usual HC-ish GUI widget
>palettes and so on. Different personalities of scripting language, such as
>VB or whatever, could be used as well.
>
>[gee, didn't we go down this route before?]
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>"If everyone lived with a sense of wonder, their lives would be filled with
>joy."
>-Last words of Doug Henning, 5/3/47 - 2/7/00
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------







More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list