Squeak forth and Logo

Dan Ingalls Dan at SqueakLand.org
Sat Apr 15 16:24:10 UTC 2006


"SmallSqueak" <smallsqueak at rogers.com>  wrote...

>...
>   That "small" talk was printed in "Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation"
>   (12/1999, pp 221-236):
>
>       http://www.brics.dk/~hosc/local/HOSC-12-3-pp221-236.pdf
>
>   So much for Guy's "small" talk and his "growable language".
>
>   Now back to the real Smalltalk's, perhaps Smalltalk 72 is the most
>   growable of them all ?
>
>   Dan had an image of Smalltalk 72 running inside Squeak.
>
>   Is there a real VM for Smalltalk 72 with source available some where?
>
>   Any pointer is very much appreciated. It would be interesting to see
>   the trio plugins for Smalltalk 72 VM running atop a couple of other VM
>   (Forth is one of them ;-)

Hi, PhiHo  -

It's on my list to revive the St-72 that I did in squeak.  I believe it will "just run" if you load it into Squeak 3.4 (it's on SqueakMap).  Even if it doesn't, all the code is there if you are interested plus, as I say, I'll put out a revised version for 3.9 "pretty soon".

I always feel the need to mention that the greatest strength of St-72 was also its greatest weakness:  By including syntax in the purview of programming, it (a) ran slowly because of parsing as it went, and (b) it was possible to write all sorts of ambiguous programs.  Oh, and did I mention (c) there were modularity problems with free variables.

That said, Smalltalk-72 got us off the launch pad -- it gave us a completely malleable and interactive system that was truly object-oriented.  That's why I bother to keep it available.  Plus, when we moved to St-76, I made the statement to Alan that we could always do St-72 in St-76, so it's a completion thing ;-).

	- Dan

PS:  About Forth...
I love Forth -- it's in many ways like St-72, and yet totally different.  St-72 has automatic storage management and is really safe.  Forth does not have automatic and is pretty fragile.  St-72 is slow, and Forth rips.  I tried a couple of Forth variants with Smalltalk's nice structure, but lack of garbage collection made it really hard to live the same way.  Helge Horch made a pretty nice run at an OO Forth, if you are interested.



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