This section will give you a rough overview of which basic classes are of interest to start with. To get more detailed info on many others not listed here, read any standard textbook on smalltalk. Also, the systemBrowser should be used to investigate these in detail.

Detailed information on individual classes is found in the class documentation, where links to all classes are found, both grouped by function and by name.

Basic classes

The basic class library consists of classes which are not related to the graphical user interface or development system. These classes will almost always be needed for any type of application. Of course, the Smalltalk/X environment itself is built on top of these classes.

The classes have been modeled to behave as described in the Blue Book [1]. They will also conform to the upcoming ANSI Smalltalk Language Standard [6].

The basic class library consists (among many others) of:

• collections
• streams
• numeric classes
• process support and exception handling
• other useful classes
• class and metaclass protocol

The smalltalk source code of all of these classes is available and delivered with the system. However, for production code, only the binary class library needs to be delivered. Both static and dynamic versions of this library can be generated (on systems that support dynamic shared libraries - of course).

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