A First Implementation of Modular Smalltalk

Abstract

A "first" implementation of the Modular Smalltalk object-oriented programming language is presented. The implementation includes an object-oriented parser, object-oriented representation for code fragments and an object-oriented C-code generator, all implemented in Smalltalk-80. This implementation validates two of the five design principles of the Modular Smalltalk language and provides a vehicle for validating the other three design principles. The macro-based C-code generator is easily adaptable to generating production code in other languages like assembler. In addition, the generation technique applies to source languages other than Modular Smalltalk. The implementation includes an efficient method dispatch based on new extensions to incremental cache table coloring. KEY WORDS: Modular Smalltalk, object-oriented, programming language, compiler, interpreter, method dispatch, code generation. - 2 - Modular Smalltalk Technical Report 93-07 1. Introduction Modular Smalltalk (MS) i..