[squeak-dev] what is smalltalk? (was: Smalltalk dialects and GSoC)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Wed Feb 12 19:52:11 UTC 2014


Dennis Schetinin asked:
> Is Self a Smalltalk? :)

Yes. To quote Mario Wolczko, "Self is like Smalltalk, only more so."

It seems that I have the only copy of his "Self includes: Smalltalk"
paper online:

http://www.merlintec.com/download/mario.pdf

The pages are in the reverse order, which makes it nice to print on
simple printers but a bit complicated to read on a screen.

It is very important to notice that this is *not* like a Lisp or Prolog
implemented on top of Squeak. A casual reading of this paper might give
this impression, but it really is something different. Self is treated
as a kernel Smalltalk which is then expanded into full GNU Smalltalk
compatibility. There aren't two layers, but a single language.

This is in contrast to PEP, which implemented Java by compiling it to
Self bytecodes. That is like NewSpeak using the Squeak VM:

> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.23.6906&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Since this paper ("Towards a Universal Implementation Substrate for
Object-Oriented Languages" by Mario Wolczko, Ole Agesen and David Ungar)
talks about both projects it is easy to get the impression that they
were the same kind of thing and that saying "Self is a Smalltalk" would
be as silly as saying "Self is a Java". The details are important.

-- Jecel



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