GNU Smalltalk User’s Guide: Features

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2 Features of GNU Smalltalk

In this section, the features which are specific to GNU Smalltalk are described. These features include support for calling C functions from within Smalltalk, accessing environment variables, and controlling various aspects of compilation and execution monitoring.

Note that, in general, GNU Smalltalk is much more powerful than the original Smalltalk-80, as it contains a lot of methods that are common in today’s Smalltalk implementation and are present in the ANSI Standard for Smalltalk, but were absent in the Blue Book. Examples include Collection’s allSatisfy: and anySatisfy: methods and many methods in SystemDictionary (the Smalltalk dictionary’s class).

• Extended streams: Extensions to streams, and generators

• Regular expressions: String matching extensions

• Namespaces: Avoiding clashes between class names.

• Disk file-IO: Methods for reading and writing disk files.

• Object dumping: Methods that read and write objects in binary format.

• Dynamic loading: Picking external libraries and modules at run-time.

• Documentation: Automatic documentation generation.

• Memory access: The direct memory accessing classes and methods, plus broadcasts from the virtual machine.

• GC: The GNU Smalltalk memory manager.

• Security: Sandboxing and access control.

• Special objects: Methods to assign particular properties to objects.