Phil Fraering writes:

Aren't there freely available versions of Smalltalk for Unix? GNU Smalltalk apparently lacks the classical graphic interface, but from what I've seen, so does Perl ;-)

pgf

Yes, and you mostly get what you pay for: a "toy" environment that nobody I know uses for anything. (The Gnu Smalltalk is analogous to the toy implementations of Lisp and Scheme in C....a useful pegagogic tool, but lacking the richness that the full "environments" are so well-known for.) The serious work is done in ParcPlace's VisualWorks, DigiTalk's Smalltalk/V, or the new SmalltalkAgents from QKS. Besides, I don't _have_ a Unix machine and I have no interest in getting one (nor in trying to install a Unix on my Macs). The above programs are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix, in varying degrees and combinations. (VisualWorks is mostly targetting Windows, Smalltalk/V is a cheaper alternative, for both Windows and Macs, and SmalltalkAgents has been released for the Mac, with versions for the PowerPC (Q2 94), and Windows32/NT and SPARCstations to follow. I'm not grinding an axe for Smalltalk, understand. Just commenting on some directions. Maybe TCL is the way to go, maybe mixtures of Perl scripts and short C programs are The One True Way (the remailers work this way, and they are our major public success to date, with new things like MagicMoney following the same path, so....). The proposed language "Joule" (which some of our list members are doing) may or may not be ideal, but in any case it is probably at least a few years off. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."