An Interface for an Optimizer in the Highly Interactive Environment of Small Talk

The Smalltalk-80 system provides an object-oriented, graphical, highly interactive programming environment. The Samlltalk system follows the model of communicating objects to an extreme; everything in the system is an object and all computation consists of messages being sent from one object to another. Every object in the system is accessible to the user for observation and manipulation. Most objects have visual representations that allow the user to select and manipulate information from the high resolution graphical display by using a pointing device, such as a mouse. Smalltalk is a rich programming environment for prototyping, developing, and modifying code especially in the area of user interfaces. Its main problem is poor performance.