Hi!
Perhaps it's not the best place to ask, but as a lot of first-time Smalltalk ers including the inventors of Smalltalk theirselves are listening, I'd like to ask some questions regarding Smalltalk-76. I got a photocopy of an old article called "The Smalltalk-76 Programming System, Design and Implementation" (Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Prog. Lang.) which was very interesting to read. I don't know the date of publishing, but I guess it was between 1977 and 1979.
I'd like to gather more information about this system. Everything, pointers to other articles, electronically available documents, a formal language description or even parts of the source code would be welcome.
From the paper, I could already get a first impression of the 76 flavor of
Smalltalk, and it's very interesting to compare it with ST-80. In ST-76, I like the way how writing accessing methods are specified and how array access had been implemented. IMHO that's more elegant that using at: and at:put: nowaday. Perhaps the syntax of ST-80 has been simplified too much. I wonder whether ST-76 already featured block closures. Where there additional features which are not detailed in the paper and why where they dropped in ST-80? What has been added in ST-80 beyond meta classes (and perhaps block closures).
Thanks in advance, bye -- Stefan Matthias Aust // Are you ready to discover the twilight zone?