Message-ID: <3B73D0DA.319A3167@csi.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 08:17:30 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (Win98; U)
X-Accept-Language: en,fr,ru,es,it,ga,de,ja,gd,eu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Other languages
References: <B794B374.B13%edutec@idirect.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.34.37.104
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.34.37.104
X-Trace: excalibur.gbmtech.net 997449248 208.34.37.104 (10 Aug 2001 09:14:08 EST)
Lines: 34
X-Authenticated-User: jnc
X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 127.0.0.1
Path: news.duke.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!nntp-out.monmouth.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed1.cidera.com!Cidera!news-reader.ntrnet.net!uunet!ash.uu.net!excalibur.gbmtech.net
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:90944

Roger Kenyon wrote:

> Has anybody ever attempted a parser with Smalltalk? If so, what were the
> results?

I actually have yet to see anybody build an object-oriented parser at all.
Most attempts I've seen have pitifully done what Inform does on purpose:
create a parser object.

Hmm...Does anyone know whether any work has been done in this area?  I might
imagine that you'd end up with something of a state machine (each state
being an object), but again, I haven't seen anyone try it.


> I ask, in part, because Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/) uses a virtual
> machine, is free, open-source, cross-platform, object-oriented, and
> web-ready with a plug-in.

Squeak, alas, is HUGE and has possibly the most bizarre user interface I
have ever seen, barring such warped travesties as IBM's RealCD.  However,
there are a handful of other nifty Smalltalk interpreters around which are
nearly as portable (as in, they come distributed as fairly clean C source
code).

Tim Budd's "Little Smalltalk"
(http://www.smalltalk.org/versions/LittleSmalltalk.html) would probably be
the easiest to get running, being 1800 lines of code and designed as an
example for his textbook.

However, that still doesn't solve the "I wouldn't know how to parse under
Smalltalk" problem, so I'm hoping someone else pipes up with a decent
reference.


