"Richard A. O'Keefe" wrote:
> 
>         "My boss gave me a set
>         of criteria which needs to be filled:
> (1) intuitive and easy to use IDE;
> (2) simplified GUI design and event handling;
> (3) advanced error handling;
> (4) advanced object oriented design including
> (4a) multiple inheritance,
> (4b) abstract classes,
> (4c) and garbage collection;
> (5) full support for operator and function overloading;
> (6) and portable (at compile-time) across various platforms.
>         I have already looked at C++, Java, C++, C#, Eiffel, and even VB.net;
>         I may be missing something but as far as I can tell all of these
>         languages are missing something from this list."
> 
> Squeak is of course missing (4a) and arguably (5).
> It's not clear whether (3) means exceptions or the kind of error logging
> and handling stuff required in telecoms software.
> As for (1), that always seems to mean "I don't want to learn anything new."
> 
> To be perfectly honest, the only thing Eiffel is missing here is (5),
> but most Eiffel programmers don't miss it.  (Mind you, what Betrand Meyer
> thinks of under (3) is very different from C++ exceptions...)
> 
> Arguably O'CAML meets these requirements.

Arguably I suppose SmallScript might meet all the requirements, if you consider mixin-inheritance to be a reasonable approximation of multiple inheritence.  Also it supports multimethods, which I think would cover function overloading in #5.  (even though multimethods are dynamic and function overloading is usually thought of as static)

I'd say all Smalltalks (and thus Squeak) have full support for operator overloading in spirit, because nearly all the operators from other languages are implemented as binary messages in Smalltalk, the lone (?) exception being the assignment operator.

(I suppose SmallScript might not meet #1, since I don't think it has a full IDE typical of other Smalltalks, but it will probably have one eventually.)

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com