The Self Handbook

Release:for Self 2017.1 Date:May 05, 2017

Edited by Russell Allen.

Authors (in alphabetical order): Ole Agesen, Lars Bak, Craig Chambers, Bay-Wei Chang, Urs Hölzle, John Maloney, Tobias Pape, Randall B. Smith, David Ungar and Mario Wolczko.

Thanks to Ganesh R for his transcription services.

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. History
  • 1.2. System Overview
• 2. Getting Started
  • 2.1. Downloading Prebuilt VM and snapshot
  • 2.2. Running on OS X
  • 2.3. Running on Linux
  • 2.4. Building your own system
• 3. Language Reference
  • 3.1. Objects
  • 3.2. Slot descriptors
  • 3.3. Expressions
  • 3.4. Lexical elements
• 4. The Self World
  • 4.1. World Organization
  • 4.2. The Roots of Behavior
  • 4.3. Blocks, Booleans, and Control Structures
  • 4.4. Numbers and Time
  • 4.5. Collections
  • 4.6. Pairs
  • 4.7. Mirrors
  • 4.8. Messages
  • 4.9. Processes and the Prompt
  • 4.10. Foreign Objects
  • 4.11. I/O and Unix
  • 4.12. Other Objects
  • 4.13. How to build the world
  • 4.14. How to use the low-level interrupt facilities
  • 4.15. Using the textual debugger
  • 4.16. Logging
• 5. A Guide to Programming Style
  • 5.1. Behaviorism versus Reflection
  • 5.2. Objects Have Many Roles
  • 5.3. Naming and Printing
  • 5.4. How to Return Multiple Values
  • 5.5. Substituting Values for Blocks
  • 5.6. nil Considered Naughty
  • 5.7. Hash and =
  • 5.8. Equality, Identity, and Indistinguishability
• 6. How to Program in Self
  • 6.1. Introduction
  • 6.2. Browsing Concepts
  • 6.3. Hacking Objects
  • 6.4. The Transporter
• 7. Morphic: The Self User Interface Framework
  • 7.1. Overview
  • 7.2. Composite Morphs
  • 7.3. Morph Traits and Prototypes
  • 7.4. Saving a Composite Morph
  • 7.5. Handling User Input
  • 7.6. Drag and Drop
  • 7.7. Automatic Layout
  • 7.8. Animation
  • 7.9. Other Issues
  • 7.10. Morph Responsibilities
  • 7.11. Some Useful Morphs
  • 7.12. The Graphical Environment
• 8. Virtual Machine Reference
  • 8.1. Building a VM
  • 8.2. Startup options
  • 8.3. System-triggered messages
  • 8.4. Run-time message lookup errors
  • 8.5. Low-level error messages
  • 8.6. An example
  • 8.7. Lookup errors
  • 8.8. Programmer defined errors
  • 8.9. Primitive errors
  • 8.10. Nonrecoverable process errors
  • 8.11. Fatal errors
  • 8.12. The initial Self world
  • 8.13. Option Primitives
  • 8.14. Interfacing with other languages
• 9. References
• 10. Appendices
  • 10.1. Glossary
  • 10.2. Lexical overview
  • 10.3. Syntax overview
  • 10.4. Built-in types
  • 10.5. Useful Selectors
  • 10.6. Every Menu Item in the Programming Environment
  • 10.7. The system monitor
  • 10.8. Primitives
• 11. Extras
  • 11.1. The Original Self UI