On Smalltalk

GNU Smalltalk has launched a new site. I thought it was about time to give it a try so I can write my shell scripts in Smalltalk. I work in Windows but I use Cygwin so I can have a real shell handy, fortunately GNU Smalltalk runs under Cygwin. So I fire up a shell and grab the latest version, unzip and untar it...

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/smalltalk-2.3.6.tar.gz
gunzip smalltalk-2.3.6.tar.gz
tar -xf smalltalk-2.3.6.tar

So far so good. The instructions say I need autoreconfig, so I fire up Cygwin setup and hit the Devel category and install it, just to be safe I install gcc compilers for C and C++ as well. Time to build Smalltalk (that sounds weird to me).

autoreconf -fvi
./configure
make

Takes a minute, checks a gazillion things, but all is well, build seems to work fine. Time to run the unit tests...

make check

Good to go, so lets install...

make install

OK, now just type "gst" to get a REPL, play around for a bit, and write my first simple shell script, a quick loop printing 1 to 10000 on stdout...

#!/usr/local/bin/gst -f
(1 to: 10000) do:[:it | it printOn: stdout].
!

Sweet, works like a charm. I can now fall back on Smalltalk for shell scripting instead of ruby or pearl when I need more power than simple bash scripts.

Stealing a sample from the Wiki shows a nice scripting syntax making use of blocks for declaring class and method bodies...

Object subclass: Person [
    | name age |
    Person class >> name: aString age: anInteger [
        ^(self new)
            name: aString; 
            age: anInteger; 
            yourself
    ]

    name [ ^name ]
    name: aString [ name := aString ]
    age [ ^age ]
    age: anInteger [ age := anInteger ]

    printOn: aStream [
        aStream << ('%1 (%2)' % {name. age})
    ]
]

I think I like it! Only time will tell, but I think this will be my new scripting language of choice.