K.J. wrote:
This is mostly a guess(as I don't know much about the smalltalk lanuage), but I don't think that it's possible to write an OS in smalltalk.
Uh, yes and no. The original Smalltalk [73|76|80] systems were operating systems, after a fashion. Except for a very small (16KB seems to be the number I recall, but that was on a special-purpose 16-bit processor) amount of assembly code for the core bytecode interpreter and a small library of low level support routines, the whole system was written in Smalltalk, including the system kernel, the Smalltalk interpreter/compiler, the windowing manager, the editors and the networking manager.
For more details, try to locate a copy of
Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation, which gives detailed information on the original implementation. It is a difficult book to get a hold of, though large university libraries often carry a copy, and Amazon does carry it as well for a surprisingly low price -
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 55-3170344
You may also want to check out
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/
Which has, among other things, a paper on the Smalltalk-76 system design, and samples from the book's section on implementation details.
Another copy of Dan Ingalls paper can be found at
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/uploads/ 400/Smalltalk-76.pdf
HTH.
