Overview

This page contains a variety of supplementary information about the topics covered in this class. Additionally, there is some the information on how to better utilize the Smalltalk environment to get your programming done. Altough the labs cover this latter topic, what is contained here is material which covers ground for which there may not be time to cover in lab, but which is probably useful to know to make your programming life easier. The topics covered on this page are:

Using Visual/Object Works

I've created a slide show that kind of shows you how to go about entering the code given in chapter one of the book into visual works. [ the postscript of the slide show is available on the Prism file system at ~gt7510f/2390/slideshow.ps. This prints out with page breaks in nice places and landscape orientation. 21 pages long. ]

more stuff still under contemplation of construction....

Other SmallTalk 80 Implementations

For those of you thinking of using SmallTalk 80 on your own there is good news and bad news. The good news is that there are are variety of Smalltalk implementations out there. The bad news in most of them cost bucks and that the environment is quirky differences with Visual/Object Works. Enough so that using another environment will probably cause more problems than adds convience for you ( and you TAs ).

As Georgia Tech students you should be able to pick up a copy of Visual/Object Works from OIT for Macintosh and Windows ( you must show up with your own box of disks though ) ... I'll have more info in this in the future, but for now I think the Windows version takes up 10 disks and Visual Works 2.0 wants 12 MB of memory to play in. For most of you this probably means boosting your swap file partion up just a tad.

OO* Information

The comp.object FAQ contains pointers to a wide variety of answers about numerous aspects of OOA/OOD/OOP etc. You can learn alot by just generally reading through a FAQ file. However, the information cotained therein usually doesn't present a cohesive picture. However, if you get to the point where you have a question... the FAQ file usually helps.

There is also a comp.lang.smalltalk FAQ file. This file is mainly vendor/implemention independent so don't count on it to answer tool specific questions.

Dynamic Programming

As was mentioned in the first lecture Apple Computer is in the process of developing a new Dynamic Programming language called Dylan. Actually, a number of people are starting Dylan implementations. One of those groups is Project Gwdyion Group at CMU. [ NOTE: later this quarter... if I get time. I might get Mindy running on some local machines.]

They also have a page describing various dynamic programming languages.

Other Useful Tools

Revision Control System

You can use RCS on you *.st files.... a pointer to documentation on RCS coming soon.

Other Documentation

The Concept of Inheritance in Knowledge Representation

2360 talks a little about Inheritance. Here's Kurt Eiselt's lecture on that topic. The lecture is practically Lisp-free so you don't have to decipher an unknown language to read it. [ NOTE: Kurt's Lecture notes are copyrighted by him ]. Oh yeah, please don't follow the reverse links that bottom of that page. They'll take you someplace that is out of date and you don't want to be. :-)


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Last modified: by Lyman S. Taylor(lyman@cc.gatech.edu)
(c) copyright Lyman S. Taylor 1995, All rights reserved