The Evolution of Smalltalk

Created on 2020-08-09T23:20:37.518478

Smalltalk was written in assembly at first, but subsequent Smalltalks were themselves written in Smalltalk.
Very small integers are stored directly in machine words with special tags, otherwise words are pointers to objects.
The subscript operator and left arrow was lost in the conversion from ST-78 to ST-80. They would have rather had "a ! b := value" instead of "a at: b put: value."
True and False are subclasses of Boolean. They can then implement boolean-based control flow as any other message that makes use of blocks.
Object is a subclass of nil
`become:` was added when object types were moved from hash tables (OOZE) to indices in an object type vector.