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SourceIDE: A Semi-live Cross-development IDE for Cola

SourceIDE: A Semi-live Cross-development IDE for Cola Scott Wallace, Viewpoints Research Institute, 2008

This paper describes the first phase of a long-term effort that will culminate in the availability of native, incremental, “live,” interactive development environments for the “Cola” family of languages.

Here's a peek at bootstrapping a new programming environment. The author has written an IDE for the new Cola programming language by adapting Squeak's IDE to operate on external source files written in a language other than Smalltalk. This was done as temporary scaffolding to help develop (amongst other things) a successor IDE written in the target language itself. Oj what a lot of disposable code to write for bootstrap!

This is a part of Alan Kay and Viewpoints Research's Inventing Fundamental New Computing Technologies project. I've just started hacking on this project myself and I'm really excited so expect more about it in the coming weeks!

By Luke Gorrie at 2008-09-18 06:48 | Implementation | other blogs | 9453 reads

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XTalk was a similar thing

In late 1980s and early 1990s, the Xanadu folks were implementing their work in a typed SmallTalk dialect called XTalk that they had implemented in the SmallTalk environment. XTalk attempted (with pretty good success) to capture the intersection of SmallTalk and C++. There were code generators to both, allowing debugging to occur in the SmallTalk debugging environment and production execution to run in statically compiled form.

Different goal, of course, but a related and interesting approach.

By shap at Thu, 2008-09-18 20:49 | login or register to post comments

Typo in URL

The link to Scott's paper should be http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008002_sourceIDe.pdf. (Note the "rn" rather than "rm")

By Frank Shearar at Fri, 2009-03-13 09:12 | login or register to post comments

Fixed, thanks!

Fixed, thanks!

By Luke Gorrie at Fri, 2009-03-13 09:16 | login or register to post comments