multi-language GUI / shells in Smalltalk

Ralph Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Thu May 3 21:35:07 UTC 2007


> Comments welcome, especially negative (but constructive) ones.
> I am looking for comments on whether this is a good or bad idea,
> not a detailed description of what all the problems are,
> though the latter may be useful too.

There is a class method "compilerClass'.  So, you can define a class
method that indicates the compiler to use, and the browser will use
that compiler for your class.

Anybody can generate bytecodes, there is nothing magical about them.
However, save your image often, because bad bytecodes can crash your
image.

SmaCC is not bad, and it will not be easy to do better.  I bet the
reason you are trying to redo it is that you have written parser
generators before, and figure it will be a good starting project for
Squeak.

Writing a parser and interpreter for other languages is cool.  There
are already ones for Lisp and Prolog.  However, this doesn't entirely
solve the interoperability problem, since the basic datatypes of the
languages often differs.  Making a shell for Squeak is also a good
idea, but it wouldn't necessarily require a new parser, let alone a
parser generator.

-Ralph



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