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Re: [Help-smalltalk] GNU vs. Squeak vs. VW
From: |
Stephen Compall |
Subject: |
Re: [Help-smalltalk] GNU vs. Squeak vs. VW |
Date: |
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:09:08 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070509 SeaMonkey/1.1.2 |
Bill Schwab wrote:
I am a long-time Smalltalk addict with a lot of Dolphin-based code. I
would be completely happy were it not for what I see as a disturbing
trend of bloat, bugs, and licensing hassles from Microsoft. Every OS
revision brings a round of "what did they break this time?" I hate to
think what Vista would be like.
Dolphin on Wine is one possible solution, though I worry about how Wine
decides which bugs to emulate, the quality of their reverse engineering,
etc.
I assume that you are looking for a way to move to GNU/Linux or another
Free UN*X-y OS.
Squeak's streams bother me. IMHO
'hello' readStream next:20
should raise an error; #nextAvailable: offers a way to "safely" get
truncated results. I care because I do a lot of sometimes very strict
parsing, and want to know ASAP when something is not as expected.
Would be hard to change without reopening a Smalltalk standardization
process.
Re GNU, licensing is of some concern. I have seen some
softening/clarification of the terms to favor proprietary software.
There are things I am willing to give away, but I would be crazy to open
everything, so I need a system that will accommodate internal production
use as well as commercial deployment. For now, let's assume things are
ok, though comments are welcome.
Probably; see Section 1.5 "Licensing of GNU Smalltalk" in the current
manual. It's not so much "favoring" proprietary software as allowing
for the possibility of its existence.
Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> But if somebody
> wants to *add* something more, I'm all good with that and (lo and
> behold) RMS happens to desire that more than having a great headless
> Smalltalk!
Wha-what's going on here?
--
;;; Stephen Compall ** http://scompall.nocandysw.com/blog **
But you know how reluctant paranormal phenomena are to reveal
themselves when skeptics are present. --Robert Sheaffer, SkI 9/2003