Strongtalk VM?

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Mark Haniford wrote:
> I've seen Brian on the Strongtalk mailinglist, but I thought I would bring up
> the Strongtalk VM here.  My question is if it could be used for Slate?  Are
> the semantics of Slate to foreign for a Smalltalk VM?   I noticed that a couple
> people wanted the Lisp interpreter for Slate.  Does anybody have any
> specific plans for working on Slate? 

The most visible feature of Slate, the multiple dispatch, can be
reasonably emulated on a Smalltalk VM either by generating extra methods
without any changes to the VM (a bit like Squeak now implements Traits)
or more efficiently by a reasonably simple change to the VM. It took a
while for me to convince myself that this was the case since I didn't
know about some restrictions on Slate's dispatch. Then I posted the
extra method solution here, but I can go into it and the other one again
if there is interest.

Other things like optional arguments and multiple viewpoints are much
more complicated.

--Jecel