Inferring types in Smalltalk

Abstract

Smalltalk is an object-oriented language designed and implemented by the Learning Research (Group of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center [2, 5, 14]. Some features of this language are: abstract data classes, information inheritance by a superclass-subclass mechanism, message passing semantics, extremely late binding no type declarations, and automatic storage management. Experience has shown that large complex systems can be written in Smalltalk in quite a short period of time; it is also used to teach programming to children quite effectively. Object-oriented languages like Smalltalk have begun to be accepted as friendly languages for novice programmers on personal computers.