GENERAL

"Producer" is a package to translate Smalltalk-80 code to Objective-C.

The original producer package was written by B.Cox and K.Schmucker around 1986-1987 and a paper about producer was submitted to OOPSLA-86 (see original producer package) (published in 87?). The software was posted by Dieter H. Zebbedies in 1987 to Usenet (with permission of the authors, under the condition that "you may not sell products that contain any part of the Producer distribution without PPI's permission").

This program, called "new producer" (nproducer) is a port of the "old producer" towards objc 4.x syntax of the original. The original can be found in the archives of the comp.sources.misc newsgroup.

"nproducer" should compile with any Objective-C-4.x-language compiler, e.g. with the Portable Object Compiler.

"nproducer" requires Stepstone ICpak101, or a clone, such as the Portable Object Compiler's ObjectPak (version 1.9.5 or higher of Object Pak).

See http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/devel/lang/objc.

"producer", on the other hand, is/was written in Objective-C 3.x-style and compiles only with old (and probably impossible to find) Stepstone 3.x compilers.

LICENSE

The nproducer program is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. See the LICENSE file.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

1 -- Most classes are the same as in the original producer, except for some things like indexed variables (not supported by all modern compilers).

2 -- Renamed 'Block' to 'Blk' because meanwhile Objective-C has a real Block class.

2 -- As include/import convention, we've been experimenting in this package wiith what I'll call, Rob Pike's Plan 9 convention. By this, I mean : .h files don't include other .h files, and .m files are responsible for including things in the right order. (This is an idea that I've read in notes from Rob Pike about the Plan 9 C compiler, as their alternative to the 'unix convention').

CONTACT INFORMATION

Comments welcome,

David Stes
Email: stes@can.nl
July 1998