
Smalltalk 80 – Blue Book (1983) [pdf] - tosh
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf
======
endlessvoid94
I have a copy of this on my bookshelf. I highly recommend reading the portion
of the book about the structure of the object memory. An interesting approach
that influenced much of what we have today in VMs, with one notable exception.

In Smalltalk there was no filesystem, so the canonical representation of the
system was in memory at all times while the system was booted. It dumped and
restored this object memory on shutdown and boot. Its structure also allowed
for automated refactoring at a semantic level (objects knew who their callers
were) which is something no other language I've ever used is capable of.

~~~
man-and-laptop
> An interesting approach that influenced much of what we have today in VMs,
> with one notable exception.

What's the exception?

~~~
kazinator
Maybe the stuff in the endlessvoid94's second paragraph: _Its structure also
allowed for automated refactoring at a semantic level (objects knew who their
callers were) which is something no other language I 've ever used is capable
of._

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kensai
Any known links to the other books of the series? The green and the red, for
instance?

~~~
pkaye
You can try archive.org. If no luck I can find my links when I get back to my
home computer.

~~~
pkaye
Found it.
[http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html)

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ardy42
What's the difference between "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its
Implementation" and "Smalltalk-80: The Language"? The latter is more recent
(1989 vs 1983) and seems to be a "second edition," but it's shorter (608 vs
714 pages). Did they drop a chapter or something?

~~~
boztek
It’s missing the VM implementation description at the end.

~~~
scroot
Specifically, the portion called "The Implementation" is a description of the
VM written in Smalltalk itself. This is an attempt to be as complete as
McCarthy's Lisp language description and implementation in Lisp.

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i_feel_great
"<-" as the assignment operator. That's cute.

I have also seen "_" as the assignment operator in some old Squeak code
though.

~~~
orhmeh09
In R, <\- is the predominant assignment operator, and until 2003 it supported
_ as well, for compatibility with its predecessor, S. Here’s a post about it:
[https://colinfay.me/r-assignment/](https://colinfay.me/r-assignment/)

Modern ligatures fonts like Fira Code turn the bracket and dash into an actual
arrow, which is nice!

~~~
truculent
Nice link!

FWIW, You also see <\- within Haskell's do notation. Apparently F# and OCaml
use it in places, too:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_(computer_science)#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_\(computer_science\)#Notation)

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renatoguimaraes
Amazing book and admirable work. Need to be shared and read.

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_kst_
From the 6th page:

"Copyright © 1983 by Xerox Corporation

All right reserved."

If Xerox had legitimately released this to the public, surely they would have
changed the copyright notice.

As far as I can tell, this is simply pirated.

From
[http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/)
:

"I started to be fed up to see all the books I like to be out of print, so I
started to contact authors and collect their old books. I would like to thanks
them all and their publishers as well. If you know an author that is willing
to give to the community a book, please give him my email."

I'm not sure that changes anything.

~~~
jacquesm
I'd rather see it pirated than lost.

~~~
_kst_
I'd rather not see Hacker News get in trouble for linking to pirated material.

~~~
saltyshake
The chances of anyone raising a copyright claim for a 36 year old book
relating to obsolete technology are quite low.

~~~
beefhash
To me, it's not the chance of somebody getting in trouble that worries me, but
rather the blatant disregard and disrespect for intellectual property rights.

~~~
saltyshake
imho letting more people read this material shows higher respect to it and its
creators than letting it be forgotten.

The book is out of print and not available otherwise. No one is making money
off this book.

~~~
_kst_
Have you talked to your representatives about changing copyright law so that
out-of-print books can legally be copied?

~~~
coldtea
People can act without representatives too.

Remember Aaron Swartz?

~~~
pstuart
It didn't work out too well for him, unfortunately.

~~~
coldtea
No, but turned out OK for Rosa Parks...

