Skip to main content

Reminder: March meeting tomorrow evening

Tomorrow evening (Mon 9th Mar from 18:00) we will be meeting at the usual venue for beer, food and Smalltalk.

For this meeting we have a topic: The ANSI Smalltalk Syntax STEP

STEPs are Smalltalk Enhancement Proposals. The The ANSI Smalltalk Syntax STEP is not really a proposal, rather it is capturing the syntax rules expressed in the current ANSI Smalltalk standard (ANSI INCITS 319-1988) as EBNF. Why do this? Well, the ANSI standards are copyright (to INCITS in this case) and so we can't use the syntax definition as expressed in the standard document in Smalltalk STEPs, so we need a re-expression of the ideas that can be made available under an open license for future STEP work.

If you just want to come along for a beer and a chat, that's fine too :-)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TruffleSqueak: A Squeak/Smalltalk System for the GraalVM - Wednesday, June 24th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, June 24th. Fabio Niephaus  will talk to us about TruffleSqueak , a Squeak/Smalltalk VM and Polyglot Programming Environment for the GraalVM . He is a Ph.D. student within the Software Architecture Group  at the Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany. He has strong interests in dynamic programming languages, virtual execution environments, and software development tools. Fabio will talk about the motivation for his research in the field of Polyglot Programming. With a live demo, he will show how TruffleSqueak can be used as a polyglot IDE for other languages such as Java, Javascript, Python, R, or Ruby. He will also introduce us to the GraalVM ecosystem and discuss his experience in writing a Smalltalk VM in Truffle, GraalVM's language implementation framework. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advanc

Craig Latta - WebAssembly as a Smalltalk Compilation Target (v1) - 22 February 2023

WebAssembly (WASM) is an instruction format for portable high-performance code, run by a stack-based virtual machine. To Smalltalkers, this sounds very familiar. WASM is supported by the three most popular web browsers, and by other host platforms as well. Perhaps we can translate certain Smalltalk compiled methods to WASM, augmenting our support for physical processors and for livecoding the Web. For our February meeting, Craig Latta will describe his initial experiments, using the Epigram compilation framework. Craig Latta is a research computer scientist in Berkeley and Amsterdam, with interests including livecoding, music performance, and interactive visualization. The discovery of a mysteriously-placed copy of the Blue Book at university led to stints at several exploratory labs, and a pursuit of improvisation wherever code is found. This will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive th

A Tour of Architectural Abstraction with Objective-S - Wednesday, November 24th

This month, the UKSTUG will take a look at Objective-S , an architecture-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C, by hosting his creator Marcel Weiher. As per Alan Kay, “Code seems large and complicated for what it does” . Objective-S addresses one source of this accidental complexity: using software architectural abstraction to directly expresses the much wider variety of architectural styles typical of modern software systems, compared to traditional programming languages that still follow the call/return architectural style of scientific programs from the early days of computing. Marcel Weiher started his forays into dynamic object-oriented computing by implementing Objective-C on his Amiga 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Stops on the way have been at Apple, the BBC, Microsoft and various startups, as well as contributing to Squeak. He is currently a principal software engineer at Citymapper and PhD student at HPI, where he is trying to distill some