From: "Albert L. Wagner" <alwagner@...>
Date: 2002-02-01T23:18:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Actor & Ruby

I remember it. I bought a copy, but never got a chance to use it
commercially.

Aidan Mark wrote:
> 
> Does anyone else rember the Whitewater Group's programming language Actor?
> 
> As soon as I started programming in Ruby I began to have a deja vu feeling.
> After years of Java programming Ruby seem, well, so harmonious, consistent
> and sympathetic. Then it suddenly hit me, the very first OOP language I
> learned also had those properties. It was also a "C"-like syntax Smalltalk
> relative, where everything was an object - Actor.
> 
> Actor was sold with a Smalltalk like development environement for Windows
> 3.0 (and earlier) around 1989-92. If you look on the internet you won't find
> much about this language, but it did resemble Ruby in many ways. Its
> Smalltalk inheritance was apparent, it was fully OOP right down to advanced
> concepts like metaclasses, blocks as parameters and lambda functions.
> However Actor was semi-compiled to a Forth like byte code VM. This didn't
> stop its programs being useful outside of the environment. You could package
> up the code and release it as a EXE and DLL, my girlfriend and I wrote some
> computer aided learning programs that make quite complex use of the Windows
> API. Actor was for a time the easiest way to code Windowing applications on
> its chosen platform - and was around way before there were viable C++
> implementations for PCs, let alone Java.
> 
> Actor died because it was a propriatory language limited to one platform and
> one development environement. When Borland C++ and VC++ boomed, Actor
> dissapeared. Shame it was a nice language, far nicer than C++. I would love
> to reread its specification and make a comparison between Actor and Ruby.
> Alas my copies of the manuals have dissapeared long ago.
> 
> Anyone other ex-Actor programmers now programming in Ruby?
> 
> Aidan

-- 
"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom:
 the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."
 - Walter Lippman