CompuServe Messages

Source will probably be available "on request", source now is hovering at around 750K of code, really too much to upload. Even the executable is going to be about 200K+, I have been talking with john foust about turning it over to Amicus and letting them distribute it on their disks. Smalltalk would really be wonderful! I've wanted it since they had the article in Byte magazine years ago. Even playing with the object oriented programming in XLISP is neat. My biggest problems with porting Icon have been memory management, i.e. the amiga doesn't provide you with contiguous data areas for Icon's workspace as it would on any computer with an MMU, and the fact that Lattice C cannot do call-by-value with structures,unions etc. The manual says they can, but it is a very strange way of doing it, they don't actually push the structure word for word onto the stack as other C's do, they push a pointer to the structure and the compiler generates code inside your function to take the pointer and make a local copy. Dumb! The entire Icon interpreter is based on passing structures called descriptors around to do all its work. Snobol would have similar problems too, maybe smalltalk too but I don't know the internals, but a lot of the so-called big languages like these at least assume a contiguous workspace which you can't get on the Amiga. From my battles with Lattice's C compiler and MetacomCo's excuse for an assembler and linker you'll probably be in for a very long grind, but don't despair! I want smalltalk! <grin> Bye – Gary