AmigaTalk V2.5 uploaded to Aminet!

[stychokiller]

AmigaTalk V2.5 has been uploaded to dev/lang/AmigaTalk.lha in aminet & is available
for you to use!  A lot of improvements have been made to this version, so read the amigatalk.readme
file in aminet.
Jim Steichen, author of AmigaTalk

[odin]

What does it do? A new frontend for narrator.device? :-)

[theTAO]

I'll second that.  I have the greatest respect for anybody toiling over Amiga software (since we need all the programmers we can get!), but I skimmed the readme and I'm still confused.

Software authors, when you post announcements, no matter how widely you think your program is known, please please include a sentence or two describing what it does.  I can't count the number of times I've seen announcements for "SuperMegaRoboPlayer 10.01" and just stared blankly at the text.

Todd

[tormedhammaren]

AmigaTalk is based upon Little Smalltalk

Little Smalltalk is an open tiny version of Smalltalk.

"First and foremost, let me say at the beginning in as LOUD a voice as I can that Little Smalltalk is NOT a smalltalk-80 system. If you want a real Smalltalk system go buy one from ParcPlace, Digitalk, IBM, or whomever.

Little Smalltalk is a sort of fun experiment in building a minimal smalltalk system. The source code for the interpreter is less than 1800 lines of code. The image consists of less than 4000 objects. It runs in almost no memory. In short, it's small, it's reasonably fast, it's easy to understand, and easy to modify."
- Timothy A. Budd (web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~budd/), creator of Little Smalltalk.

Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. The language was generally released as Smalltalk-80 and has been widely used since.

Smalltalk's big ideas include:

* "Everything is an object." Strings, integers, booleans, class definitions, blocks of code, stack frames, memory are all represented as objects.
* Everything is available for modification. If you want to change the IDE, you can do it-- in a running system, without stopping to recompile and restart. If you want a new control construct in the language, you can add it. In some implementations, you can change even the syntax of the language, or the way the garbage collection works.
* Types are dynamic -- this means that you don't have to define types in the code which makes the language much more concise.
* Garbage collection is built in and invisible to the developer.
* Smalltalk programs are usually compiled to bytecodes, run by a virtual machine.
* Dynamic translation: modern commercial virtual machines compile bytecodes to the native machine code for fast execution, a technique pioneered by Smalltalk-80 from ParcPlace Systems in mid-1980s. This idea was adopted by Java some ten years later and named "J   ust-in-time compilation", or JIT.