I just committed unix-domain sockets (AF_UNIX) for GNU Smalltalk.

GNU Smalltalk's socket library is more or less based on the java.net library, but java.net does not have AF_UNIX sockets! Okay, they are not portable to Windows, but you'd expect someone to have written an extension library for that. But no, there is none. Why?

It turns out that there are two problems.

When I was taking a look at Ruby to learn what is it like, I faced a concept called "block". But I never got it bacause you could do everything with a block, also with traditional methods you learned so far. So I asked myself, why would a human being invent something like block? Maybe this is because of the people who tries to explain the blocks or because of my low IQ but this was the case for me when learning Ruby.

Hi all,

My name is Giuseppe Luigi Punzi, and I'm 25 years old.

I live in Murcia, Spain, and I'm software developer since 12 years old.

My main experience comes from Delphi, .NET, OPL and Oval (this is for develop for Psion platform), with knowledge over Interbase, Firebird, Oracle, SQLServer, Access, VB, and so on. (No, I don't have C/C++ experience, and I think I don't need it)

Peter Norvig's blog showed an example of a toy spell checker in Python, which Michael Davies converted to Smalltalk. This problem is interesting and Michael's solution is actually quite idiomatic.

I'll show a couple more tricks that can help decrease the number of lines.

GNU Smalltalk 3.0 has been released at

   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk

The release was tested on the following systems:

• i686-pc-linux-gnu
• x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
• powerpc-apple-darwin8.9.0
• powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
• sparc-unknown-linux-gnu
• ia64-hp-linux-gnu
• s390-ibm-linux-gnu
• hppa-hp-linux-gnu

Thanks to Stephen Compall, Thomas Girard, Robin Redeker for help and testing of this release!

News from 2.3.6 to 3.0

(Changes from the last release candidate, 2.95h, are listed later.)

Important changes: