LittleSmalltalk

Development History Of LST 5.0

The history of LittleSmalltalk 5.0

5.0 alpha 008 - Release date: ???

This release was a precompiled only release for the Win32 platform. It provided several bug fixes to make the system more stable. I never published sources for this version and I never thought about it as being a real version. It was just an intermediate release that fixed some strange bugs in alpha 007.

5.0 alpha 007 - Release date: 01/13/2007

Lots of new stuff, for example:

• The nogui version is now ported to a variety of platforms (Linux, Mac OS/X, SUN Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, SGI Irix and of course Windows). These ports are based on work done by Alex! Thanks!
• The Windows version now comes in two versions in the   precompiled package: gui based and without gui.   The GUI based image opens per default the   image file "LittleSmalltalk.image".   The non-GUI version opens per default the   image file "LittleSmalltalk_nogui.image".
• New Startup structure in the standard images.
  
    This new structure is realized by a series of classes:
  • Application
  • ShellApplication
  • LittleSmalltalkShellApplication
  • GUIApplication
  • LittleSmalltalkApplication
    An application provides a method #image: that creates   a new image that at startup will call the #onStartup method   of the application object.
  
    Subclasses of ShellApplication don't use the GUI subsystem.   Subclasses of GUIApplication are GUI based applications.   There are two conrete classes that startup GUI resp. nongui   LittleSmalltalk systems: LittleSmalltalkApplication and   LittleSmalltalkShellApplication.
  
    If you want to create your own GUI application, do this:
  •  
  • Create a subclass of GUIApplication, say HelloWorldApplication
  •  
  • Copy the #onStartup method of LittleSmalltalkApplication into     your class and change it according to your needs.
  •  
  • Then create an image with a command like this:
        HelloWorldApplication new image: 'HelloWorld.image'
• Lots of minor and major bug fixes and improvements, some examples:
  •  
  • Symbols like #keyword:Message:Symbol: can now be parsed correctly.
  •  
  • -1 < 0 now returns true ;)
  •  
  • "true print" and "false print" did sometimes crash.
  •  
  • (20 to: -20 by: -2) do: [ :x | x print ] now works.
  •  
  • etc. pp. lots of low level improvements

5.0 alpha 006 - Release date: 01/06/2007

• Allows Import and Export of class definitions to allow usage of classes after changing to a new LST image

5.0 alpha 005 - Release date: 01/05/2007

• Major enhancments:
  • New class browser
  • New Launcher / Transcript
  • New Workspace
  • These tools are now written using the widget classes
• Several bug fixes
• Comes with a precompiled version for Windows (Earlier versions were source only...)

5.0 alpha 004 - Release date: 01/02/2007

• Updated third party libraries: IUP2.5, CD4.4, SQLite 3.3.8
• Compiles now fine with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition

5.0 alpha 003 - Release date: 01/02/2007

• Comes with the beginning of FFI functionality

5.0 alpha 002 - Release date: 01/01/2007

• Some GUI extensions
• Some GUI examples
• Some bug fixes

5.0 alpha 001 - Release date: 12/30/2006

The first release after 4.1. Changes include:

• Methods can be larger than in earlier versions (class BigString etc.)
• Lots of errors corrected
• Lots of new methods
• GUI binding using the IUP library from tecgraf.
• GUI primitives are wrapped by the methods in class GUIPrimitives
• A simple class browser (class NewBrowser) that directly uses the primitives
• Some more usable classes (Widget, WLabel, WButton, WidgetManager etc.)
• Provides SQLite primitives in the VM

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