I found a version of Smalltalk-72 online through Gilad Bracha on Google+. It’s being written by Dan Ingalls, the original implementor of Smalltalk, on his relatively new web authoring platform called Lively Kernel (or Lively Web). I don’t know what Ingalls has planned for it, whether this will be up for long. I’m just writing about it because I found it an interesting and enlightening experience, and I wanted to share about it with others so that hopefully you’ll gain similar value from trying it out. You can use ST-72 here. I have some words of warning about it, as I’ll gradually describe in this post.
First of all, I’ve noticed as of this writing that as it’s loading up it puts up a scary “error occurred” message, and a bunch of “loading” messages get spewed all over the screen. However, if you are patient, all will be well. The error screen clears after a bit, and you can start using ST-72. This looks to be a work in progress, and some of it works.
What you’ll see is a white vertical rectangle surrounded by a yellowish box that contains some buttons. The white rectangle represents the screen area you work in. At the bottom of that screen area is a command line, which starts off with “Welcome to SMALLTALK.”
This environment was created using an original saved image of a running Smalltalk-72 system from 40 years ago. Even though the title says “ALTO Smalltalk-72,” it’s apparently running on a Nova emulator. The Nova was a minicomputer from Data General, which was the original platform Smalltalk was written on at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. I’m unclear on what the connection is to the Alto’s hardware. You can even look at a Nova assembly monitor display by clicking on the “Show Nova” button, which will show you a disassembly of the machine instructions that the emulator is executing as you use Smalltalk. (To get back to Smalltalk, click on “Show Smalltalk.”) The screen display you see is as it was originally.
Smalltalk-72 is not the first version of Smalltalk, but it comes pretty close. According to Alan Kay’s retelling in “The Early History of Smalltalk,” there was an earlier version (which was the result of a bet he made with his PARC colleagues), but it was rudimentary.
This version does not run like the versions of Smalltalk most people familiar with it have used, which were based on Smalltalk-80. There are no workspace windows (yet), other than the command line interface at the bottom of the screen area, though there is a class editor (which as of this writing I’d say is non-functional). It doesn’t look like there’s a debugger. Anytime an error occurs, a subwindow with an error message pops up (which can be dismissed by pressing ctrl-D). You can still get some things done with the environment. To really get an idea of how to use it you need to click on “Open ST-72 Manual.” This will bring up a PDF of the original Smalltalk-72 documentation.
What you should keep in mind, though, (again, as of this writing) is that some features will not work at all. File functions do not work. There’s a keystroke the manual calls “‘s”, which is supposed to recall a specified object attribute, such as, for example, “title’s string” to access a variable called “string” out of an object called “title.” (“title” receives “‘s string” as separate messages (“‘s” and “string”), but “‘s” is supposed to be received as a single character, not two, as shown.) I have not been able to find this keystroke on the keyboard, though you can substitute a different message for it (whatever you want to use) inside a class. The biggest thing missing at this point is that while it can read the mouse pointer’s position, this ST-72 environment does not detect any mouse button presses (the original mouse that was used with it had several mouse buttons). This disables any ability to use the built-in class editor, which makes using ST-72 a chore for anything more than “hello world”-type stuff, because besides adding a method to a class (which is easy to do), it seems the only way to change code inside a class is to erase the class (assign nil to its name), and then completely rewrite it. I also found this made later code examples in the documentation (which got more into sophisticated graphics) impossible to try out, as much as I tried to use keyboard actions to substitute for mouse clicks.
What I liked about seeing this version was it helped explain what Kay was talking about when he described the first versions of Smalltalk as “iconic” programming languages, and what he described with Smalltalk’s parsing technique, in “The Early History of Smalltalk” (which I will call “TEHS” hereafter).
To use this version, you’ll need to get familiar with how to use your keyboard to type out the right symbols. It’s not cryptic like APL, but it’s impossible to do much without using some symbolic characters in the code.
The most fascinating aspect to me is that parsing was a major part of how objects operated in this environment. If you’re familiar with Lisp, ST-72 will seem a bit Lisp-like. In fact, Kay says in TEHS that one of his objectives was to improve on Lisp’s use of “special forms” by making them unnecessary. He said that he did this by making parsing an integral part of how objects operate, and by making what appear to be syntactic elements (what would be reserved words or characters in other languages) their own classes, which receive messages, which are just other elements of a Smalltalk expression in your code; so that the parsing action goes pretty deep into how the whole system operates.
Objects in ST-72 exist in what I’d call a “nether world” between the way that Lisp functions and macros behave (without the code generation part). Rather than substitute bound values and evaluate, like Lisp does, it parses tokens and evaluates (though it has bound values in class, instance, and temporary variables).
It’s possible to create a class which has no methods (or just an implicit anonymous one). Done this way, it looks almost like a lambda (an anonymous function) in Lisp with no parameters. However, to pass parameters to an object, the preferred method is to execute some parsing actions inside the class’s code. ST-72 makes this pretty easy. Once you start doing it, using the “eyeball” character, classes start to look a bit like Lisp functions with a COND expression in it.
Distinguishing between using a class and an instance of it can be confusing in this environment. If you reference a class and pass it a message, that’s executing a class’s code using its class variable(s). (In ST-80 this would be called using “class-side code,” though in ST-72 the only distinction between class and instance is what variables inside the class specification get used. The code that gets executed is exactly the same in both cases.) In order to use an object instance (using its instance variable(s)), you have to assign the class to a variable first, and then pass your message to that variable. Assigning a class to a variable automatically creates an instance of the class. There is no “new” operator. The semantics of assignment look similar to that of SETQ in Lisp.
A major difference I notice between ST-72 and ST-80 is that in ST-80 you generally set up a method with a signature that lays out what message it will receive, and its parameter values, and this is distinct from the functionality that the method executes. In ST-72 you create a method by setting up a parsing expression (using the “eyeball” character) within the body of the class code, followed by an “implies” (conditional) expression, which then may contain additional parsing/implies expressions within it to get the message’s parameters, and somewhere in the chain of these expressions you execute an action once the message is fully parsed. I imagine this could get messy with sophisticated interactions, but at the same time I appreciated it, because it can allow a very straightforward programming style when using the class.
Creating a class is easy. You use the keyword “to” (“to” is itself a class, though I won’t get into that). If anyone has used the Logo language, this will look familiar. One of Kay’s inspirations for Smalltalk was Logo. After the “to”, you give the class a name, and enter any temporary, instance, and/or class variables. After that, you start a vector (a list) which contains your code for the class, and then you close off the vector to complete the class specification.
All graphics in ST-72 are done using a “turtle,” (though it is possible to use x-y coordinates with it to position it, and to direct it to draw lines). So it’s easy to do turtle graphics in this version of Smalltalk. If you go all the way through the documentation, you’ll see that Kay and Adele Goldberg, who co-wrote the documentation, do some sophisticated things with the graphics capabilities, such as creating windows, and menus, though since mouse button presses are non-functional at this point, I found this part difficult, if not impossible to deal with.
I have at times found that I’ve wanted to just start the emulator over and erase what I’ve done. You can do this by hitting the “Show Nova” button, hitting the “Restart” button, and then hitting “Show Smalltalk.”
Here is the best I could do for an ST-72 key map. Some of this is documented. Some of it I found through trial and error. You’ll generally get the gist of what these keys do as you go through the ST-72 documentation.
| function | keystroke | description |
| ! (“do it”) | \ (backslash) | evaluates expression entered on the command line, and executes it |
| hand | shift-‘ | quotes a literal (equivalent to “quote” in Lisp) |
| eyeball | shift-5 | “look for” – for parsing tokens |
| open colon | ctrl-C | fetch the next token, but do not evaluate (looks like two small circles one on top of the other) |
| keyhole | ctrl-K | peek at the input stream, but do not fetch token from it |
| implies | shift-/ | used to create if…then…else… expressions |
| return | shift-1 | returns value |
| smiley/turtle | shift-2 | for turtle graphics |
| open square | shift-7 | bitwise operation, followed by: a * (number) = a AND (number) a + (number) = a OR (number) a – (number) = a XOR (number) a / (number) = a left-shift by (number) |
| ? | shift-~ (tilde) | question mark character |
| ‘s | (unknown) | |
| done | ctrl-D | exit subwindow |
| unary minus | – | |
| less-than-or-equal | ctrl-A | |
| greater-than-or-equal | ctrl-Z | |
| not equal | ctrl-N | |
| % | ctrl-V | |
| @ | ctrl-F | |
| ! | ctrl-Q | exclamation point character |
| “ | ctrl-O | double quote character |
| zero(?) | shift-4 | |
| up-arrow | shift-6 | |
| assignment | shift-_ | displays a left-arrow, equivalent to “=” in Algol-derived languages. |
| temp/instance/class variable separator | : (colon) | (this character looks like ‘/’ in the ST-72 documentation, but you should use “:” instead) |
When entering Smalltalk code, the Return key does not enter the code into the system. It just does a line-feed so you can enter more code. To execute code you must “do it,” by pressing ‘\’.
You’ll notice some of the keystrokes are just for typing out a literal character, like ‘?’. This is due to the emulator re-mapping some of the keystrokes on your keyboard to do something else, so it was necessary to also re-map the substituted characters to something else so they could still be used.
Using ST-72 feels like playing around in a sandbox. It’s fun seeing what you can find out. Enjoy.
This is one of a series of “bread crumb” articles I’ve written. To see more like this, go to the Bread Crumbs page.
Tekkie 