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From: dbuck@superior.carleton.ca (Dave Buck)
Subject: Re: Smalltalk-80: The Language
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References: <johnson.817221545@sal> <yf3u43qq066.fsf@sabi.demon.co.uk> <DIqLyt.74t@cunews.carleton.ca> <yf34tvomg5r.fsf@sabi.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 12:52:24 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.object:41590 comp.lang.smalltalk:31211

In article <yf34tvomg5r.fsf@sabi.demon.co.uk>,
Piercarlo Grandi <piercarl@sabi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 28 Nov 1995 05:01:41 GMT, dbuck@superior.carleton.ca (Dave
>>>> Buck) said:

>Dave> For the longest time, the de-facto standard was K&R C.
>
>De jure, de facto -- the important thing being that if you wrote to K&R
>C your programs were portable and you had not sold your soul to a
>vendor; if you did not, you were owned by a particular vendor.

I can tell you from presonal experience that K&R C was FAR from
standard.  Each dialect had its own unique quirks and porting from one
to the other was extremely difficult to maintain.  I could give you
several examples but I'm not interested in discussing C in this group.

>Dave> Even in the C++ world, you have no standard library to use for
>Dave> windowing systems.  Borland has OWL, Microsoft has MFC, and other
>Dave> venders have other packages. Again, it's no different.  If
>Dave> anything, there's more commonality in Smalltalk than there is in
>Dave> C++.
>
>Ah please, don't shift the discussion: we are not talking of the
>library: we are talking of the _language_.

I just finished saying that the "language" Smalltalk has barely
changed since the Blue Book.  It's the libraries that have changed.

>I have not made an issue of GUI libraries, or pens, or fonts, or
>whatever, important issues as they are practically, but of things like
>multiple/single inheritance, a single-rooted inheritance hierarchy or a

Smalltalk has always had single inheritance in the language itself.
The only multiple inheritance it ever had was added as a library
facility and was later removed.

>multi-rooted one, inheritance or general delegation, and similar
>_language level_ issues, which affect how one structures programs in
>general.

These are questions of design, not language.

>And please let me repeat: anybody investing in Smalltalk that is being
>persuaded by you and Jan and the others that it is not an "open"
>language, but a set of proprietary and incompatible products, would be
>very daring indeed to buy a proprietary Smalltalk from anybody but IBM,
>who is the only Smalltalk supplier whose middle and long term existence
>can be presumed safely.

Groundless scare tactics.

David Buck
dbuck@ccs.carleton.ca

_________________________________
| David K. Buck                 |
| dbuck@ccs.carleton.ca         |
| The Object People             |
|_______________________________|
