Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

#Smalltalk - Open Source Smalltalk for .NET

Posted by timothy on from the cognitive-dissonance dept.

David Buck writes "John Brant and Don Roberts have released an Open Source Smalltalk compiler and library for .NET called #Smalltalk. This is the first widely available Smalltalk for the .NET platform. #Smalltalk is ANSI compliant and programs written in it compile to DLL's or Windows executables. The compiler is still early in its development, but it looks interesting." (You may recall this earlier mention as well.)

5 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. First Mention by refactoringdr · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, the previous mention was for our competitor's language, S#. Our's is #Smalltalk.

    Don Roberts
    roberts@refactory.com
    The Simplest Consultant That Could Possibly Work

  2. Re:General #Smalltalk Questions; #Smalltalk and Mo by refactoringdr · · Score: 4, Informative

    1. That's up to the Mono or dotGNU people. We use the Reflection API A LOT and the current implementation on those platforms isn't quite up to snuff.

    2. This differs almost none. We love smalltalk tried to recreate the experience as much as possible. It does not currently come with an IDE (that's the next step). We've been using other Smalltalk's to edit the applications that we then export as .sif files and then compile. (Heck...people have been bugging us for years to make the RB more like emacs...they got their wish :) ). You can debug it using the standard CLRDBG program from M$. This gives you single stepping, inspecting, and even code evaluation (as long as you express the code in C#'esque syntax). You can override DNU and it works. I don't think that you can do all the really ugly tricks that ST'ers abuse.

    3. It differs from S# (same thing as SmallScript since Dave took the name) in the following ways. 1) As true as possible to st80 2) Open Source 3) Free (as in beer)

    The beauty of it all is that you can program in real, honest to goodness Smalltalk, and when you decide you need to call other .NET objects, you can still use ST syntax. For example, to use the .NET MessageBox class, in C# you would write System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("Hello World"); in #Smalltalk you write System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox Show: 'Hello World'.

    Thanks and Enjoy

    don

  3. Re:General #Smalltalk Questions; #Smalltalk and Mo by refactoringdr · · Score: 3, Informative

    To be fair...we implement most of the Smalltalk collections by wrapping a smalltalk object around a .NET object. But we aren't a Smalltalk->C# translator, we generate "native" msil :).

    don

  4. Re:sweet! by refactoringdr · · Score: 2, Informative

    I believe that it's been tested on rotor and doesn't quite work. Rumor is that the Reflection API isn't quite up to snuff. Feel free to experiment with it and help us get it working on that platform too.

    don

  5. Re:General #Smalltalk Questions; #Smalltalk and Mo by refactoringdr · · Score: 3, Informative

    The first keyword is the original .Net method name. Additional keywords can be anything you want. For example, WebClient in .net has a method named DownloadFile that takes the url and the filename to download to. In C# you would say webclient.DownloadFile("http://slashdot.org","foo. txt"). The equivalent call in #Smalltalk is webclient DownloadFile: 'http://slashdot.org' to: 'foo.txt'. The to: keyword is arbitrary, I could have called it foo: and the call would still work so long as the first keyword was DownloadFile. Contructors are similar 0-arg constructors are invoke by the "new" message (as you would expect). Multiple arg constructors are called by adding more (arbitrary keywords). For example, to create a .NET point: System.Drawing.Point new: 3 y: 5.

    hope this helps.

    don