Talk:Languages

Pilot OS inaccuracies

The article says that Pilot-OS was the operating system for the Xerox Alto and Star workstations, and that it was written mostly in Smalltalk-80. To my understanding, Pilot-OS was written in Mesa (a different object oriented language, described as being similar to Java), not Smalltalk, and ran only on the Xerox Star. The Alto ran a different unnamed operating system, which was written in BCPL and Assembly. Here are my sources for this: Alto Operating System Reference Manual Pilot Alto_Mesa_1974.pdf. I'm going to go ahead and change what the article says since I'm fairly confident that it's an inaccuracy. I'd also like it if someone could get me a citation on the claim that there have been operating systems written in Smalltalk - to my understanding, if Smalltalk can run without a special machine (virtual or physical), then it's not Smalltalk. The article may be talking about how Smalltalk is implemented as an operating system written in itself, but I'd argue that this doesn't really count as the type of operating system that this Wiki is meant for. ---1 22:49, 28 November 2021 (CST)