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Can you elaborate? Smalltalk was certainly a pioneer in that area but in the past twenty years, plenty of languages have implemented closures in a way that's p

Can you elaborate? Smalltalk was certainly a pioneer in that area but in the past twenty years, plenty of languages have implemented closures in a way that's pretty much 100% identical to how Smalltalk did it, just with different syntaxes. What's so different about Smalltalk's closures from the likes of Rust, C#, Kotlin, Swift, Groovy, etc...?

pjmlp 5y ago
They are objects as well, you can get the metaclass of a Smalltalk code block and manipulate it at your pleasure.
mpweiher 5y ago
One difference is that they are used for all control structures: a = b ifTrue:[ ... ] a = b ifFalse:[ ... ] a = b ifTrue:[ ...] ifFalse:[ ... ] [ a = b ] whileTrue: [ ... ] And "control structures" aren't actually control structures that are built into the language. They are just messages sent to blocks (closures). That includes iteration, so a for "loop" is: 1 to:10 do: [ :i | ... ] Which is just a shorthand for (1 to:10) do:[ :i | ... ] With (1 to:10) creating an Interval object, a virtual collection that understands the normal collection iteration protocol (do:, collect:, select:, reject:, inject: ). OO + Closures + keyword syntax. An elegant and powerful combination.
- afandian 5y ago
  It's been a while but this looks very much like Ruby to me.
  - vvillena 5y ago
    Ruby is a mashup of Perl and Smalltalk wrapped in pleasant syntax.
  - chaosite 5y ago
    Yeah, I was going to ask if they came across Ruby, which was heavily inspired by Smalltalk.
- projektfu 5y ago
  Not “part of the language” but definitely privileged in the implementation. #ifTrue:ifFalse: gets rewritten and inlined as a branch in just about every compiler. If you implemented your own, it would suffer in performance.