Objectives

This appendix presents a brief introduction to the programming language Smalltalk. It discusses the design principles underlying Smalltalk and the terminology originally associated with Smalltalk. It further covers the basic syntactic constructs and characterizes object behavior and inheritance using examples. Also, an illustration is given of the use of the MVC paradigm.

Points to emphasize

• design principles -- prototyping
• terminology -- object, class, protocols
• syntax -- method expressions
• objects -- self reference
• inheritance -- class hierarchy
• techniques -- MVC paradigm

Comments

It is important to emphasize that all expressions in Smalltalk are basically method expressions, including the definition of classes and metaclasses.