The Smalltalk Programming Language A Comparison with Java Colin …

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Some new ideas that Smalltalk brought to the programming world was being fully Object … a large and complex program. Smalltalk’s delimiters and syntax are …

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The Smalltalk Programming Language:
A Comparison with Java
Colin Whitehouse
5/24/04Smalltalk came around long before Java did, and even long before Java’s
immediate ancestors. Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others
invented Smalltalk at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) during the 1970’s.
Some new ideas that Smalltalk brought to the programming world was being fully Object
Oriented, everything in Smalltalk is an object from strings, to integers and even memory
are all represented as objects. Smalltalk also helped greatly with the development of
Graphical User Interfaces (GUI’s). Smalltalk has features such as garbage collection, and
even has an Intergraded Development Environment (IDE) that is open source and
available for modifications. However, a strange feature that Smalltalk doesn’t contain is
basic built-in constructs such as for, while, and if-then-else, etc. However Smalltalk can
get around this “setback” because everything is an object. For example sending an ifTrue
message to a Boolean object makes decisions in the Smalltalk language, and then passes
a fragment of code to execute of the Boolean is true.
Java was invented by James Gosling and his team at Sun Microsystems. It was
first developed in 1991, and was intended to be used to program…