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From: hmm@heeg.de (Hans-Martin Mosner)
Subject: Re: Game Of Life in smalltalk
Message-ID: <E1JGzx.3qE@heeg.de>
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Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 17:09:33 GMT
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Blaine Pinch (ccscon55@superior.carleton.ca) wrote:
: -- 

: Has anyone created a "Game Of Life" in smalltalk and if so, how was it 
: for speed.... dog slow?

The original Smalltalk-80 image had the Game Of Life implemented with
some clever BitBlt manipulations. What they did was essentially
implement a bit-sequencial addition of all cells in parallel.

It was actually rather speedy, considering how it worked...
The slowest part of it was the final magnification of the
playground (also done with BitBlt).

If you don't know what BitBlt is: It was the central graphics
engine for the Smalltalk-80 system. Much of Smalltalk-80's
beauty was due to the fact that all graphical output was done
using that single operation, so an implementor could implement
just this simple operation to get the system on screen.
Compare that with all the quirks and unorthogonal "features"
of current window systems...
The only thing that was really missing was support for
non-rectangular clipping regions, to enable partially obscured
window to update themselves properly.

Hans-Martin

--
+--- Hans-Martin Mosner ---- Senior Smalltalk Guru :-) ---+
| These opinions are entirely ficticious.  Any similarity |
| to real opinions is purely coincidental and unintended. |
+--- <hmm@heeg.de> ------ URL:http://www.heeg.de/~hmm/ ---+
