@lanodan @ilja >Why then are there so many people who always want the latest shiny new thing :D Because shiny things mean better social status, better social status or implying having helps bringing some type of people you consider good.
>Would probably more think that sentient enough animals are able to recognise that shiny stuff aren't better than the rest. Organic beings don't go from fungi to homo-sapiens without having nothing in between and the rule applies for future evolution. One day birds will evolve and nuke themselves, and probably would create a brain robot that will try to exterminate them and make human/bird hybrid grills.
GNU Smalltalk is an implementation that closely follows the Smalltalk-80 language as described in the book Smalltalk-80: the Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and David Robson, which will hereinafter be referred to as the Blue Book.
The Smalltalk programming language is an object oriented programming language. This means, for one thing, that when programming you are thinking of not only the data that an object contains, but also of the operations available on that object. The object’s data representation capabilities and the operations available on the object are “inseparable”; the set of things that you can do with an object is defined precisely by the set of operations, which Smalltalk calls methods, that are available for that object: each object belongs to a class (a datatype and the set of functions that operate on it) or, better, it is an instance of that class. You cannot even examine the contents of an object from the outside—to an outsider, the object is a black box that has some state and some operations available, but that’s all you know: when you want to perform an operation on an object, you can only send it a message, and the object picks up the method that corresponds to that message.
In the Smalltalk language, everything is an object. This includes not only numbers and all data structures, but even classes, methods, pieces of code within a method (blocks or closures), stack frames (contexts), etc. Even if and while structures are implemented as methods sent to particular objects.