Small Talk Assignment - Programming Languages

Running head: PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES BASED ON SMALLTALK
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
Programming languages based on Smalltalk programming language
Name of the student
Student Id and Assessment Id
Name of the University
Author Note

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PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES BASED ON SMALLTALK PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGE
Executive summary
This report consists of a discussion about the Smalltalk programming language. The chosen
country is Canada. This report also consists of the discussion about the development of the
language and the reason for its development. The report also consists of an overview of the
language that will be used to better understand about the concepts associated. Moreover, this
report presents a language evaluation which shows the processes that are used and the syntax that
are followed. Lastly, this report includes an assessment of the language such that it can be
adopted for use by programmers.

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PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES BASED ON SMALLTALK PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGE
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Language development....................................................................................................................3
Developer/Designer.....................................................................................................................3
Time period..................................................................................................................................3
Domain and category...................................................................................................................3
Motivation and Intended use.......................................................................................................4
Language overview..........................................................................................................................4
Implementation method...............................................................................................................4
Features of the language..............................................................................................................5
Sample programming codes depicting the features of Smalltalk................................................6
Style of the language...................................................................................................................8
Language Evaluation.......................................................................................................................8
Basic OOP concepts and terminology.........................................................................................8
Object model................................................................................................................................9
Message sending syntax..............................................................................................................9
Smalltalk syntax.........................................................................................................................12
Language assessment.....................................................................................................................12
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................13
References......................................................................................................................................14

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PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES BASED ON SMALLTALK PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGE
Introduction
Smalltalk programming language is considered to be a very unique language which is to
be considered by programmers. This report discusses about the programming language known as
Smalltalk and also discusses about the key aspects and concepts which are also included in
Smalltalk. The history of Smalltalk involves the inclusion of the first embodied object orientation
in languages. Before the discovery of it, there were other types of languages like Clu and Simula.
The use of Smalltalk led to the use of various object oriented concepts like object, class,
message, method and inheritance. This led to the discovery of more modern languages like C++
and Java.
This report also includes a general discussion of the concepts of the language. The
concepts of language development are also discussed in this paper. Moreover, the overview of
the language and the evaluation of the language have been shown in this report. Lastly, this
report also discusses an assessment of the language.
Language development
This section of the report discusses about the development of the language and its
relevant topics.
Developer/Designer
There is much amount of Smalltalk language variants. The first version of the language
was made in the year 1980. The first version of the language was made due to the research
adopted by Alan Kay at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In addition, Adele
Goldberg was responsible for documenting them and Dan Ingalls was responsible for
implementing the early versions of the language (Coupland, 2014). Furthermore, a similar
variant of the language known as the Smalltalk-72 was made which introduced the use of Actor
model. However, the syntax and the model of execution were considered to be different than the
modern versions of the language.
Time period
After applying various revision, the Smalltalk-76 was introduced which froze some of the
application semantics. The system also included a development environment which consisted of
the modern tools used along with class library code editor (Bracha & Ungar, 2015). Moreover,
for adding the purpose of object-oriented programming, the Smalltalk-80 added the concept of
metaclasses. This helped in associating behaviors and properties with various individual classes
along with the primitive values as well for creating instances.
The first variant of the language was the first version of Smalltalk-80. It was given for
peer review to various firms and Universities as well. After a certain period of time, the second
version of the same variant was released this was supposed to be platform-independent (Callaú et
al., 2013). It also included a virtual machine implementation of the language. After the year
1998, the ANSI Smalltalk has been the reference programming language for this case.