7 ms·

You still have to stop somewhere and supply actual numeric data (which is the only real data there is). I think it was in one Smalltalk book: so there are obje

You still have to stop somewhere and supply actual numeric data (which is the only real data there is). I think it was in one Smalltalk book: so there are objects that send messages to each other, but how things are really done in Smalltalk? :) At some points there are primitive actions that actually do the work. Similarly with data we can define objects or any other higher-level concepts, but somewhere there must be actual data under all these abstractions.

scroot 6y ago
It is in the final section of the Blue Book [1], where the virtual machine is described in Smalltalk itself. Basically you have tagged integer values and pointers and that's it. The VM describes a bytecode set that involves manipulation of memory structures that are the objects, along with very primitive arithmetic operations on low level integers. [1] http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....