Norbert, Not to start an argument or anything, where do we disagree? I assume I am a bit more jaded about the usefulness of _most_ canned components, but freely admit that the odd thing here or there can be a life saver. "The need for C is quite obvious. It is the best accepted macro assembler ever invented." --- May I steal that? Well said! Bill The need for C is quite obvious. It is the best accepted macro assembler ever invented. Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254 Email: bschwab@anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 273-6785 FAX: (352) 392-7029
norbert@hartl.name 12/12/08 6:04 AM >>> On Wed, 2008-12-10 at 16:08 -0300, Alexandre Bergel wrote: Dear List,
Something is trotting in my head for few weeks. According to the mails
exchanged on this list, it seems that interacting with C is of a high
priority. I was wondering whether you had a similar need for talking to the Java world. Few months ago, I worked on Athena, a small Smalltalk VM written in Java. It can be interfaced with Squeak. This means that within Squeak, you can create Java objects and talking directly to them within Squeak.
Is there anyone who need this? I am ready to continue on this, but I would like to be use case driven.
The need for C is quite obvious. It is the best accepted macro assembler ever invented. I can see what Bill is talking about but I don't see it that way. If you want to be on the safe side you focus on the least common denominator and that is C nowadays. Using C you have the highest odds that you are able to interface with anything else. That is the same reason why IDL sucks. It is built after the least common denominator (which is C). So the interfaces are clumsy and cumbersome. Having two high-level languages interfacing via IDL is not that powerful you just lose on both sides. What you are talking about is more an integration than an interfacing issue. In this case there could be some gain. Java has its place and it is not competing with C. So there are at least two languages that are accepted today of different reasons. Widening the view on this topic I would add javascript, too. The fashion to implement in/script java has already began. The number of languages like javascript, groovy, jython, jruby, beanshell ... is speaking for itself. So what you are talking about sounds useful to me. I have two use cases in mind: Use case ME: The micro edition approach could bring squeak/smalltalk to mobile devices which I would like to see. Athena is capable of that but it has no graphics. On the other hand there is potato that is able to execute a squeak image. For this approach a combined effort of athena and potato would be a good thing. Use case SE: The standard edition approach will make use of the ScriptHost extension that comes with Java 6. Being able to script any java application with smalltalk would be just wonderful. I'm working wih rhino (mozillas javascript engine in java) at the moment and it is really wonderful. You focus on javascript and take java as your assembly language to code """low level""" tools :) Hope this helps, Norbert _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project