Smalltalk-72(ID:2845/sma012)

Early version of Smalltalk

People:
Related languages
LISP70 => Smalltalk-72   Influence
Smalltalk => Smalltalk-72   Evolution of
Smalltalk-72 => Smalltalk-74   Evolution of
References:
  • Goldberg, Adele and Alan Kay "Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual" XPARC 1976 view details pdf Abstract: The Smalltalk-72 instruction manual is intended for use by those persons with on-line access to the Xerox Interim Dynabook. The first two chapters consist of an introduction to some of the methods used for interacting with the Smalltalk system and for creating, editing, saving and retrieving Smalltalk programs. Chapter III goes deeper into the basic concepts from which everything else in Smalltalk is built. These include the method of evaluation of messages, message sending and receiving, and the notion of classes and instances.
    Many classes have already been built for the user's convenience. These include the various classes for names, arithmetic, information storage methods, text display, and graphic control. The definitions of all of these basic classes is given in Chapter IV; Chapter V then presents a number of interesting examples that use these basic classes. Chapter IV also describes utilities already provided the user for editing definitions, saving and retrieving files of information, viewing definitions, testing values, and reading input devices.
  • Snodgrass, Richard "An Object-Oriented Command Language" in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, January 1983 view details Extract: Cola
    This paper describes Cola, an object oriented command language for Hydra; Hydra is a capability-based operating system that runs on C.mmp, a tightly coupled multiprocessor. The two primary aspects of Cola, that it is a command language for Hydra, and that it is based on the object paradigm, are examined. Cola was designed to effect a correspondence between capabilities in Hydra and objects that are supported by the language. Cola is based on Smantalk in that it uses message-passing as a control structure to allow syntactic freedom in the expression of commands to the system. Cola objects are arranged in a hierarchy, and the message-passing mechanism was designed to exploit this structure by automatically forwarding an unanswered message up the hierarchy. Two ramifications of this mechanism, automatic inheritance and shadowing, are discussed. An evaluation of the design decisions is also given