[Vm-beginners] Learning Slang

[Marcus Denker]

On Feb 1, 2012, at 3:42 PM, David Corking wrote:

> Marcus Denker  wrote:
> 
>>> Although Adele Goldberg's book doesn't mention VMMaker or Slang, my
>>> limited understanding is that the extensive code presented in Chapters
>>> 27 to 30 is written in a 16 bit version of Slang.
>>> 
>> 
>> No. The Bluebook just uses Smalltalk pseudocode for documentation, it
>> was never actually compiled.
> 
> Thanks Marcus for correcting my error. I had misunderstood a comment
> about the Blue Book that Dan Ingalls made in an interview a few years
> ago. (I got the mistaken impression that the code was drawn from
> PARC's actual reference implementation of the Smalltalk-80 VM.)
> 
Yes, so the code base that is now written in SLANG started with the Smalltalk
pseude-code of the blue book.

But the blue books code was never used for the implementation back then.
(the VM was implemented very low level, in parts in the micro code of the processor...)

So they took documentation and ran it. cool, not? Now of course SLANG is not nice....
imagine a VM written in Smalltalk that would be runtime changable...

	Marcus

--
Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de