TinyTalk, a Subset of Smalltalk-76 for 64KB Microcomputers

by Kim McCall and Larry Tesler

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Palo Alto, CA 94304

SMALLTALK-76 The response to a message is implemented by a method

(procedure) which can evaluate expressions, assign to
Smalltalk-76 is an interactive, object-oriented variables, and/or send further messages in order to achieve
programming language. the desired result. A bank account might respond to the
message deposit: amount by invoking the following method:
All data structures are represented as objects. For
example, a simple bank account might be represented as an balance ,- balance + amount
object with two data fields, name and balance, along with a
set of methods (procedures) to operate upon those fields.
Each class has a message dictionary which associates a set
of.selectors with a corresponding set of methods. Part of the
A bank account
name message dictionary of class BankAccount might be:

balance Selector Method

balance balance
Each object is an instance of some class. The class
defines the internal structure and the behavior of all its deposit: balance ~- balance + amount
instances. The object shown above might be an instance of
class BankAccount. IF balance < amount THEN false
withdraw: ELSE
Processing is invoked by sending messages to objects. balance ~- balance - amount
Sending a message to an object is very much like calling a
procedure in a procedural language. Among the messages to When a message is sent to an object, the selector is
which a bank account could respond might be: looked up in the message dictionary of the object's class in
balance order to find the appropriate method to execute. Thus, there
is an important difference between sending a message in
deposit:" amount Smalltalk and calfing a procedure in a procedural language.
The decision of exactly which response is appropriate is left to
withdraw: amount
the receiver instead of being decided ahead of time by the
A message consists of an identifying key called a selector and sender. The exclusive use of such "generic" procedures
enhances modularization of programs, because the sender of a
zero or more arguments. The selectors of the messages shown
message doesn't have to be concerned at all about the internal
above are balance, deposit.:, and withdraw:. Two of those
messages have an argument named amount. structure, or even the class, of the receiver.

Further factorizafion of the representation of data and

Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted methods in the language is facilitated by subclassing. Any
provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct class may be declared to be a subclass of another, thus
commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the inheriting its code and data structure. The subclass can add
publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by further specificity of its own. For example, class
permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy
otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. OverdraftBankAccount might be a subclass of BankAccount
that allows overdraft. Each instance could have an extra field,
savingsAcct, to reference another account that could be
~ 1980 ACM 0-89791-024-9/80/0900-0197 $00.75 197 tapped in case of an overdraft.
 programming rather t h a n for supporting large-scale
applications programs.
An o v e r d r a f t bank a c c o u n t name
IMPLEMENTATION
balance
All objects other than integers are referenced within the
savingsAcct system by an Ordinary Object Pointer (OOP). The t O P is an
index into an indirect pointer table. Each entry in the table
gives the location in the heap at which the fields of the
Within class OverdraftBankAccount, the method
corresponding object are stored. The indirect table makes
withdraw: amount might be defined as:
relocation of the object during compaction very cheap and
IF balance < amount THEN easy.
IF savingsAcct withdraw: amount - balance THEN
When a new object is created, space is allocated on the
balance 4- 0
ELSE false top of the heap. The heap is allowed to grow until it reaches
ELSE balance ~- balance - amount. a certain limit, at which time the compacting garbage collector
is invoked.
The above summary is intended only to sketch the barest
essentials of Smalltalk-76. A more complete discussion of the Object code in TinyTalk is made fairly compact by a
language can be found in [Ingalls]. resident incremental compiler which translates source code
programs into byte-code strings whose syllables represent the
Several versions of Smalltalk-76 have been implemented main atomic operations performed by the system. The byte-
on minicomputers with 128K bytes or more of RAM, a code strings are executed by the TinyTalk byte-code
swapping disk, a high resolution bit-mapped display, and a interpreter. The interpreter uses a conventional push-down
pointing device. ']'he programming environment includes over stack for keeping track of its state. See [IngaUs] for a more
a hundred classes, thousands of methods, and thougands of detailed discussion of the byte-code interpreter.
other objects. Applications programs typically define a dozen
or more classes and a hundred or more procedures, and they SAMPLE SESSION
may create thousands of additional objects. A sample dialogue in TinyTalk might proceed as follows.
The user's input is prompted by a T. The system's reponse is
shown on the next line.
TINYTALK
! acct ~- BankAccount new name: 'John A~ Doe'

The programming language TinyTalk provides a subset of John A~ Doe

Smalltalk-76 which is suitable for implementation on a 64K ! acct deposit: 100
byte microcomputer. The TinyTalk compiler accepts 100
essentially the full Smalltalk-76 syntax. Its main restriction is acct deposit: 250
that space limitations permit only a few thousand objects. 350
TinyTalk does not support multiple processes. It does not ! acct withdraw: 375
require or support a bit-mapped display, or a pointing device, false
but it can be used with any standard ASCII keyboard and ! acct withdraw: 325
terminal. While Smalltalk-76 uses reference counting to 25
determine when objects can be deallocated, TinyTalk employs
CONCLUSIONS
a compacting garbage collector to guarantee reclamation of
the limited space available. Finally, some of the performance TinyTalk is a simple object-oriented language that has
optimizations incorporated into Smalltalk-76 have been left been implemented on a 64KB microcomputer. It is suitable
out of TinyTalk for the sake of simplicity and space. for reimplementation and/or use by students who wish to gain
experience with object-oriented programming languages. We
We have implemented TinyTalk on a microcomputer
plan to publish the details of the implementation in the near
containg an Intel 8086 and 64K bytes of RAM. Most
future as part of a larger work about Smalltalk.
memory space is occupied by the interpreter, storage manager,
and standard class library (including an incremental compiler
and an interactive source language debugger), leaving
REFERENCES
approximately 8K bytes of free space for user programs --
[Ingalls, Daniel H.] "The Smalltalk-76 Programming
about two or three pages of source code.
System: Fifth Annual ACM
Design and Implementation"
Because TinyTalk's space and I / 0 restrictions are fairly Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Tucson,
severe, it should be clear that the system is intended for Arizona, January 23-25, 1978.
students who wish to gain practice in object-oriented
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