Re: [Pharo-users] not a smalltalk!

[Ben Coman]

Sergi Reyner wrote: In my opinion, this dialect thing is getting increasingly silly. And confusing. And silly. Identity and vision are important parts of community building.  I wasn't around when Pharo forked from Squeak, but I can see it was useful to build a separate identity to distinguish between the projects.  It helps bring those with similar vision along for the ride.  Shredding the shackles of backward compatibility required for some projects dug deep into Squeak seems like it was a significant factor at the time.   Today I think its remains beneficial to indicate this vision up front, so that people considering Pharo are not later "surprised" as Pharo moves towards its vision, if "all" they wanted was Smalltalk-80.  cheers -ben 2014-09-06 10:01 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano <esteba...@gmail.com>: yes… 99% of the time Pharo and Squeak will be compatible.  we share the vm and a large part of the codebase.  but libraries are slowly diverging so you might find that what works in the one does not works automatically in the other.  but again… my point is that all smalltalks are dialects… there is no such thing as a reference implementation :) Esteban On 06 Sep 2014, at 10:54, PBKResearch <pe...@pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote: I don’t know what technical incompatibilities may exist, but for many practicalities Pharo is compatible with Squeak and other dialects. I am using an application (Todd Blanchard’s HTMCSS parser and validator) which was originally written for Squeak. Some years ago I ported it to Dolphin Smalltalk, with no change other than replacing Squeak’s left-arrow assignment with :=, and just two weeks ago I downloaded it from the Squeak repository on smalltalkhub.com and installed it in Pharo 3.0; it is now working perfectly with no changes from the Squeak version. If someone were developing such a package now in Pharo, it might be tempting to use the Zinc library for the input of web pages, and that might cause portability problems. Similarly, if you develop something with an elaborate user interface in Pharo, you may find that the UI code does not port easily (or at all). But the core language of Pharo (and the language in which the libraries are written) is definitely Smalltalk.   In reply to Yuriy, there are languages around which do call themselves Smalltalk, but which do not implement essential parts of standard Smalltalk. So where does the ‘have to make it compatible’ come from?   Peter Kenny   From: Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org] On Behalf Of kilon alios Sent: 05 September 2014 19:46 To: Any question about pharo is welcome Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] not a smalltalk!   AFAIK Pharo technically is not even compatible with Squeak which is where it forks form.    You assume the code you write will automatically be incompatible to smalltalk-80 but since pretty much a huge percentage of the functionality of Pharo and Smalltalk is in libraries since the language itself is so minimal , I dont think it would be so hard to make your Pharo code smalltalk-80 friendly.    I advice doing your own tests and seeing for yourself. Then ask questions how to solve problems you encounter. No reason to panic before facing the facts :)   On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 9:33 PM, Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymc...@me.com> wrote: There is a long story about all that. But to be short: - if you call it Smalltalk then you have to make it compatible with other Smalltalks. And they are a lot in the 80s… - we want to make something new and cool what may be not always compatible. So yeah On 05 Sep 2014, at 20:25, Mayuresh Kathe <mayur...@kathe.in> wrote: > hey, i've just been reading up the pharo forums, and one of the posts/entries mentions something about pharo not being a smalltalk, but instead a dialect! > > is it true? > > that would mean, all or any code i write for pharo would not be portable to other smalltalk-80 systems! > > hmnn... > > ~mayuresh > >