GNU Smalltalk User's Guide

This document describes installing and operating the gnu Smalltalk programming environment.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

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Using GNU Smalltalk:

Operation:

Legal concerns:

Features:

Extended streams: Extensions to streams, and generators
Regular expressions: String matching extensions
Namespaces: Avoiding clashes between class names.
Disk file-IO: Methods for reading and writing disk files.
Object dumping: Methods that read and write objects in binary format.
Dynamic loading: Picking external libraries and modules at run-time.
Documentation: Automatic documentation generation.
Memory access: The direct memory accessing classes and methods, plus broadcasts from the virtual machine.
GC: The gnu Smalltalk memory manager.
Security: Sandboxing and access control.
Special objects: Methods to assign particular properties to objects.

Packages

Emacs

C and Smalltalk:

External modules: Linking your libraries to the virtual machine
C callout: Calls from Smalltalk to C
C data types: Manipulating C data from Smalltalk
Smalltalk types: Manipulating Smalltalk data from C
Smalltalk callin: Calls from C to Smalltalk
Object representation: Manipulating your own Smalltalk objects
Incubator: Protecting newly created objects from garbage collections
Other C functions: Handling and creating OOPs
Using Smalltalk: The Smalltalk environment as an extension library

Tutorial:

Getting started: Starting to explore gnu Smalltalk
Some classes: Using some of the Smalltalk classes
The hierarchy: The Smalltalk class hierarchy
Creating classes: Creating a new class of objects
Creating subclasses: Adding subclasses to another class
Code blocks (I): Control structures in Smalltalk
Code blocks (II): Guess what? More control structures
Debugging: Things go bad in Smalltalk too!
More subclassing: Coexisting in the class hierarchy
Streams: Something really powerful
Exception handling: More sophisticated error handling
Behind the scenes: Some nice stuff from the Smalltalk innards
And now: Some final words
The syntax: For the most die-hard computer scientists