AmigaTalk is based upon Little Smalltalk

Little Smalltalk is an open tiny version of Smalltalk. Little Smalltalk is NOT a smalltalk-80 system. If you want a real Smalltalk system go buy one from ParcPlace, Digitalk, IBM, or whomever.

Smalltalk is a dynamically typed object oriented programming language designed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, and others during the 1970s. The language was generally released as Smalltalk-80 and has been widely used since.

Smalltalk's big ideas include:
* "Everything is an object." Strings, integers, booleans, class definitions, blocks of code, stack frames, memory are all represented as objects.
* Everything is available for modification. If you want to change the IDE, you can do it-- in a running system, without stopping to recompile and restart. If you want a new control construct in the language, you can add it. In some implementations, you can change even the syntax of the language, or the way the garbage collection works.
* Types are dynamic -- this means that you don't have to define types in the code which makes the language much more concise.
* Garbage collection is built in and invisible to the developer.
* Smalltalk programs are usually compiled to bytecodes, run by a virtual machine.
* Dynamic translation: modern commercial virtual machines compile bytecodes to the native machine code for fast execution, a technique pioneered by Smalltalk-80 from ParcPlace Systems in mid-1980s. This idea was adopted by Java some ten years later and named "Just-in-time compilation", or JIT.

Jim Steichen, author of AmigaTalk