The Self Handbook

Release:1 for Self 4.4 Date:February 19, 2010

Edited by Russell Allen.

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

Thanks to Ganesh R for his transcription services.

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. System Overview
• 2. Language Reference
  • 2.1. Objects
  • 2.2. Slot descriptors
  • 2.3. Expressions
  • 2.4. Lexical elements
• 3. The Self World
  • 1. World Organization
  • 2. The Roots of Behavior
  • 3. Blocks, Booleans, and Control Structures
  • 4. Numbers and Time
  • 5. Collections
  • 6. Pairs
  • 7. Mirrors
  • 8. Messages
  • 9. Processes and the Prompt
  • 10. Foreign Objects
  • 11. I/O and Unix
  • 12. Other Objects
  • 13. How to build the world
  • 14. How to use the low-level interrupt facilities
  • 15. Using the textual debugger
• 4. A Guide to Programming Style
  • 4.1. Behaviorism versus Reflection
  • 4.2. Objects Have Many Roles
  • 4.3. Naming and Printing
  • 4.4. How to Return Multiple Values
  • 4.5. Substituting Values for Blocks
  • 4.6. nil Considered Naughty
  • 4.7. Hash and =
  • 4.8. Equality, Identity, and Indistinguishability
• 5. How to Program in Self
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • 5.2. Browsing Concepts
  • 5.3. Hacking Objects
  • 5.4. The Transporter
• 6. Morphic: The Self User Interface Framework
  • 6.1. Overview
  • 6.2. Composite Morphs
  • 6.3. Morph Traits and Prototypes
  • 6.4. Saving a Composite Morph
  • 6.5. Handling User Input
  • 6.6. Drag and Drop
  • 6.7. Automatic Layout
  • 6.8. Animation
  • 6.9. Other Issues
  • 6.10. Morph Responsibilities
  • 6.11. Some Useful Morphs
  • 6.12. The Graphical Environment
• 7. Virtual Machine Reference
  • 7.1. Startup options
  • 7.2. System-triggered messages
  • 7.3. Run-time message lookup errors
  • 7.4. Low-level error messages
  • 7.5. An example
  • 7.6. Lookup errors
  • 7.7. Programmer defined errors
  • 7.8. Primitive errors
  • 7.9. Nonrecoverable process errors
  • 7.10. Fatal errors
  • 7.11. The initial Self world
  • 7.12. Option Primitives
  • 7.13. Interfacing with other languages
• 8. References
• 9. Appendices
  • 9.1. Glossary
  • 9.2. Lexical overview
  • 9.3. Syntax overview
  • 9.4. Built-in types
  • 9.5. Glossary of Useful Selectors
  • 9.6. Every Menu Item in the Programming Environment
  • 9.7. The system monitor
  • 9.8. Primitives