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In this section, the features which are specific to GNU Smalltalk are described. These features include support for calling C functions from within Smalltalk, accessing environment variables, and controlling various aspects of compilation and execution monitoring.
Note that, in general, GNU Smalltalk is much more powerful than the original
Smalltalk-80, as it contains a lot of methods that are common in today’s
Smalltalk implementation and are present in the ANSI Standard for
Smalltalk, but were absent in the Blue Book. Examples include
Collection’s allSatisfy:
and anySatisfy:
methods and many
methods in SystemDictionary (the Smalltalk dictionary’s class).
• Extended streams: | Extensions to streams, and generators | |
• Regular expressions: | String matching extensions | |
• Namespaces: | Avoiding clashes between class names. | |
• Disk file-IO: | Methods for reading and writing disk files. | |
• Object dumping: | Methods that read and write objects in binary format. | |
• Dynamic loading: | Picking external libraries and modules at run-time. | |
• Documentation: | Automatic documentation generation. | |
• Memory access: | The direct memory accessing classes and methods, plus broadcasts from the virtual machine. | |
• GC: | The GNU Smalltalk memory manager. | |
• Security: | Sandboxing and access control. | |
• Special objects: | Methods to assign particular properties to objects. |