Little Smalltalk

Welcome to Little Smalltalk!

Little Smalltalk is a dialect of Smalltalk created in the 1980s by Dr. Timothy Budd at the Oregon State University. An earlier version of it was the base for the book A Little Smalltalk. This book is out of print but you can still find used copies on Amazon and other places.

Little Smalltalk, or LST, adheres to the spirit of Smalltalk but does not follow the design, features or implementation of Smalltalk-80. Dr. Budd created it to run on very small machines, including those without graphical displays. Early versions of it reportedly ran on MS-DOS and I ported and ran it on a 512KB Commodore Amiga.

There were several versions of Little Smalltalk with different goals and features:

• Versions 1-3 used a small VM that included a source parser written in C. The basic object pointer (oop) was a 16-bit integer. SmallInt was 1-1000 if I remember correctly.
• Version 4 diverges from the older versions and moves a little closer to a standard Smalltalk system in that the source parser is implemented twice:
  • Once as a bootstrapping program written in C.
  • Again as a parser within the Smalltalk image written in Smalltalk.
• Small World was a version that was written in Java. This continues on with the latest implementation I have found by Russell Allen.

The project here is a fork of the original Little Smalltalk version 4.