[Vm-beginners] Learning Slang

[Mariano Martinez Peck]

Hi...for learning SLANG, the best way I found so far is by browsing the VM
code itself :)
Then when I needed to start writing my own stuff, I always found problems
because I was thinking in smalltalk so I crashed into a wall when I
remember it was slang ;)  but after a while you get it.  The other thing I
do is that when I need to write something, I think in which part the VM
could do something similar. Then I search in the VM and I learn how it does
that.  My biggest problem was to understand the limits if slang, that is,
when the subset is finishes and you are actually moving to pure Smalltalk
;)   For that I found this useful:
CCodeGenerator>>initializeCTranslationDictionary

Cheers








On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Marcus Denker <marcus.denker at inria.fr>wrote:

>
> 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
>
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>



-- 
Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com
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