Joerg Beekmann wrote:

> I read the post and this looks encouraging. One think I noticed the 
> comment " SmallCharacters and other funny and useful things are left 
> as an exercise for the reader...". What are you refering to?

At that time, Squeak only had 256 unique 8-bit characters (as in 
original Smalltalk-80) which were stored in a table. To extend this to 
Unicode you would either have to give up character uniqueness (as the 
current Squeak implementation does) or implement immediate Characters.

Other funny and useful things are, well, left as an exercise for the 
reader because I could not think of very many :-)
One thing that always comes up when talking about immediate classes are 
immediate floats. But with a 32 bit object pointer they are mostly 
useless. Immediate fixed-point numbers might have some use but would be 
pretty application specific. For a system with many communicating object 
spaces I envisioned using immediate objects for Symbols, having the 
actual Symbol storage in a separate object space. But there are many 
other possible solutions for this, so it does not require additional 
immediate objects.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin