Alain,
I don't think Squeak would be a good path to travel. Smalltalk is a good
language in some terms and is more OOP than C++ (that's easy, but anyway,
C++ was based on Smalltalk in part if I'm not mixing up names again), but
the way I understand it Sqeak is written in Smalltalk and then converted to
C++ which gives it speed gains. If we want to write a parser for xTalk on
top of that, we won't get the most effective code. Also, we'll be
restricted to the metaphors the sqeak team chose, or will at least be
forced to build upon that. And outside of this li'l camping group here, I
doubt we'd find enough supporters for the 100% HyperCard compatibility
everyone here is yearning for.
I'm also doubtful as to whether we'd be able to properly implement support
for "do" on top of the Smalltalk VM. We'd have to write our variable
management *using* the VM, which would effectively make it soo slow even
Apple's Java 1.0 implementation would royally kick our collective rear
ends. It'd be like Windows on top of DOS, if the PC users on this list will
forgive me this example.
The reason why HC is so much faster than Java is that Java is an
interpreted low-level language (like an interpreted C) with a couple of
small generic instructions while HyperTalk hasa bigger number of complex
instructions. The advantage of this is that a script that looks the
following in a low-level language:
allocate memory for string
convert number in variable x to string
display dialog string
while in HC this would be simply:
answer x
In this example a low-level language needs 3 times as much interpreted
instructions as HyperCard does. Of course, behind the scenes HyperCard does
the very same work the low-level language is doing, but the stuff happening
behind the scenes has already been compiled, and is thus a lot faster.
I hope this (simplified) example illustrates my reasons why I think the
current road we're taking is better than trying to jump on board Squeak.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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