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Category:Smalltalk: Difference between revisions
→Is it an IDE, a Scripting Language, a Compiled Language or what?
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Well, all of it. Most Smalltalks, when started come up with their own builtin IDE to work inside the so called 'image'. That is the state of all objects (not only classes!) which can be dumped at any time and restarted later. The image includes editors, compilers, apps and everything.
But many Smalltalk can also be started without a UI in. scripting mode (usually by a command line argument), and will then behave like a classic <abbr title="Read-Eval-Print-Loop">REPL</abbr>-based scripting language, reading and evaluating expressions (it should be emphasized that this is probably the least efficient use of Smalltalk, as you'll miss all the fancy IDE support...).
There is also (at least one) [[Smalltalk/X | Smalltalk]], in which you can work in the image (with incremental change and just-in-time compilation of entered code), but where you also generate stand alone pre-compiled executables for apps.
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