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

[Rick Taylor <ricktaylor@speakeasy.net>]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 03:04 -0700, Glenn English wrote:
> 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 :)

http://smalltalk.cincom.com/index.ssp
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/smalltalk/
http://www.squeak.org/

> 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
> 
> 
-- 
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