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From: knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight)
Subject: Re: Reference/Location of ANSI Smalltalk
Message-ID: <knight.786824647@tina.mrco.carleton.ca>
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Reply-To: knight@mrco.carleton.ca (Alan Knight)
Organization: Carleton University
References: <75941130165657/0006786458ND4EM@MCIMAIL.COM> <khaw.786737839@parcplace.com> <tms-071294105241@stambaugh.tiac.net>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 1994 18:24:07 GMT
Lines: 33

In <tms-071294105241@stambaugh.tiac.net> tms@stambaugh.com (Tom Stambaugh) writes:

<...standards compliance stuff...>

>Hmmm. What the numbers mean to *this* reader is that the three leaders,
>IBM, Digitalk, and ParcPlace, largely conform to each other and the spec,
>that STA has made tradeoffs because of their focus on the Mac, and that
>Enfin isn't in the game yet.

STA made lots of changes independent of their mac adaptation. For
example, Namespaces (good) and method caategories as a compiler
directive (bad).

>I speculate that the difference results from things like whether arrays
>need to use #become to grow (as in the old PP images) or whether they
>indirect through an instance var to some "contents" object.

The standard is very careful about not specifying implementation, only
specification. This should not make a difference at all. I noticed
changes due to method naming conventions. For example, ParcPlace
consistently uses the form e.g. Rectangle>>expandedBy: to indicate
that a method returns a new rectangle rather than expandBy: which
would modify the receiver. This has been added since the Blue Book,
which the standard is partly based on.

Note that the draft standard was written by IBM, which helps explain
why they have the only 100% compliance.

-- 
 Alan Knight                | The Object People
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