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dfoxtoday at 2:58 PM1 replyview on HN

All the magic of Smalltalk is in the development tools that work by means of introspection into the running image, writing source code in text files causes you to lose all that. Add to that the fact that Smalltalk when written as source files is quite verbose.

Smalltalk does have standard text source file format, but that format is best described as human-readable, not human-writable. The format is essentially a sequence of text blocks that represent operations done to the image in order to modify it to a particular state interspersed with "data" (mostly method source code, but the format can store arbitrary stuff as the data blocks).

One exception to this is GNU Smalltalk which is meant to be used with source files and to that end uses its own more sane source file syntax.


Replies

mekentoday at 4:46 PM

Fascinating. Thanks for the explanation.