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Reviewer: John David McGregor

At first glance, A little Smalltalk appears to be a typical introductory language text. A closer look reveals a much broader and more interesting book. This book does cover a subset of the Smalltalk language as its first section. The second section of the book delves into an implementation of the language called Little Smalltalk. The language section is a blend of an explanation of the syntax of Smalltalk and an overview of object-oriented programming. The author uses two applications, which are developed and explained in detail. The first, an employee database, provides an opportunity to illustrate both rapid prototyping and the ability to use existing classes to speed development. A simulation, the second application, illustrates the development of new classes. Finally, the author presents an implementation of the Dining Philosophers problem to illustrate the ease with which multiple processes are activated. The Little Smalltalk system was the result of a graduate seminar in programming languages. The author lists a set of characteristics that make an implementation of Smalltalk different from, say, one of Pascal: (1) Smalltalk is typeless, (2) objects have unscoped lifetimes, (3) Smalltalk is interactive, and (4) Smalltalk is a multiprocessing language. The impact of each of these points on the implementation is discussed. A block diagram of the implementation illustrates each of the parts that the second portion of the text investigates. The C language is used for the implementation; therefore, a prerequisite for understanding the code listings is a working knowledge of C. Although not all of the code is given in the text, it is available from Oregon State University for a reasonable price. The appendices include complete syntax descriptions and a description of the predefined classes. Commercial implementations of Smalltalk have advanced a great deal in the last two years and are becoming more widely available and more widely used. The usefulness of this book and its language is not for production; rather, it is a valuable reference for language students and language implementers. The detail of the examples in the text and the set of suggested projects in the appendix make this a good text for self-study.