Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: Starting with smalltalk

[Paolo Bonzini]

> This is a problem, but with the growing number of architectures and
> operating systems, it is just as hard for any other language
> (probably).
It's a bit different, and actually worse.  It's like you had ten 
different forks of Python, and somebody writes for one and somebody for 
the others.
> I have not found anything about packaging yet, however this is the
> kind of thing that will keep a language from ever getting out (even
> out of a computer ;-) ).
I don't think the packaging system is *too* inflexible.  It's 
underdeveloped, true, and feature requests will only help.
> > >> - A way of editing smalltalk files without the use of a commercial 
> > IDE
> >
> > This sounds as if you're thinking about commercial Smalltalks, like
> > Visual Works. Actually, most other Smalltalks don't use files - you
> > develop within the IDE, and code at the method level. Where the source
> > code is outside of the image, it is found in a repository like Envy or
> > Store, ie. a database.
> I'm sorry, but if Smalltalk can't even get out of my computer, I might
> just not bother to learn it at all. This does explain why I can't find
> any real-life implementations on the internet (like a simple hello,
> ls, find, sort or anything like that with install scripts,
> documentations and comments).
Mike is speaking about commercial Smalltalks.  GNU Smalltalk is by 
design different.  You can write your code in files, with SciTE or 
Emacs.  The next version, when it comes out, will almost surely have a 
more compact and less arcane syntax for defining classes, and so on.
> Then I guess there arn't any standard commandline argument parsing
> libraries in the stdlib either, right?
If you want, I can write one in half an hour. :-P  Would this syntax 
satisfy you (I'm getting the command line options from autoconf)?

Smalltalk
   arguments: '-B|--prepend-include: -I|--include: -t|--trace: 
-p|--preselect= -F|--freeze --help --version -v'
   do: [ :arg :option | (arg->option) printNl ].

The output could be something like

   'trace'->'AC_DEFUN'
   $v->nil
   'prepend-include'->'/usr/local/share'

if you invoked your script like

   gst -f script.st --trace=AC_DEFUN -v -B/usr/local/share
> PS If all this is really like I now think it is, I can imagine why
> this language never took off!
Maybe that's because the language was born 20 years before Python.  The 
problem is not the inflexibility of the language, is that nobody 
implemented the features that people love in other languages (due to 
lack of time, lack of funding, or sometimes even human stupidity).

Paolo