Re: Programming Languages, "to C or not to C, that is the Q."

[Glenn English <ghe@slsware.com>]

On Sun, 2005-01-23 at 23:46 -0500, J.F.Gratton wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there a few (well ok, at least one)
> OS written in SmallTalk ? I seem to remember that from my computer
> science courses. I could be something planted in my memory by some evil
> alien that wanted to promote wide-spread use of SmallTalk, tho :)

Yes there was. At Xerox PARC in the 80's. An old friend of mine used
one. It had a mouse and a GUI and everything. 

But those weren't your standard computers. PARC was a very well funded
place full of extremely smart people, and the computers were built of
ECL chips and other astoundingly fast (for the time) parts. The GUI
wasn't very fancy -- as I remember, it was monochrome and looked more
like TWM than Aqua.

And since most of a computer's time is spent in just a few loops in the
program, and since Smalltalk was written at PARC and the computers were
designed and built there too, there could well have been pre-defined
objects in the "JAR" implemented in highly hand-optimized assembly. (I
have no idea whether there were or not, but there sure would have been
if I had been doing it.) 

-- 
Glenn English
ghe@slsware.com