Cuis-Smalltalk is a pure object oriented programming (OOP) language. All the entities in the language: integers, floats, rational numbers, strings, collections, blocks of code and so forth – every instance usable as a noun in Smalltalk – is an object.

For Cuis-Smalltalk, we built Morphic 3, the third design iteration of these ideas, after Self’s Morphic 1 and Squeak’s Morphic 2. If you already know Morphic in Self or Squeak, most concepts are similar, although with some improvements: Morphic 3 coordinates are not limited to being integer numbers, the apparent size (zoom level) of elements is not tied to pixel density, and all drawing is done with high quality (subpixel) anti aliasing. These enhancements are enabled by the huge advance in hardware resources since Self and Squeak were designed (in the late 80’s and late 90’s respectively). Additionally, careful design of the framework relieves Morph programmers from much the complexity that was required, especially with regards to geometry.

  You have noticed that text typed into the Workspace is colored and highlighted based on what you type. We will discuss this below when we talk about the Smalltalk language, but the idea is to be helpful. If you start to type a word the Cuis Workspace knows about, you can press the tab key and get a set of choices for completion of the word. Try typing Float epsi and pressing tab. You can then press enter and should see Float epsilon. Click elsewhere on the Workspace to make this menu go away.

The code examples in the online version can be directly copied and pasted into Cuis-Smalltalk. This is why the assignment character “←” you see in the developer Cuis-Smalltalk window is printed as “:=” in the online version of the book. The same applies with the return character “↑” printed as “^” in the online version.