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From: fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)
Subject: Re: OO, C++, and something much better!
Date: 1997/01/22
Message-ID: <5c4ita$3qs@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>#1/1
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references: <JSA.97Jan16141937@alexandria> <5bphq4$5js@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
 			<32E05FAF.47BA@concentric.net> <5buodl$bci@boursy.news.erols.com>
 			<32E2FEC7.2F7B@concentric.net> <6PE5zLpF3RB@herold.franken.de>
 <32E57E2B.6CB7@epix.net> <32E57FBC.2325@epix.net>
organization: Comp Sci, University of Melbourne
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.object
Date: 1997-01-22T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


"Matthew S. Whiting" <whiting@epix.net> writes:

>Anyone, know REALLY how Smalltalk got its start in the financial
>application space?

I don't know how it got its start there, but I have heard that it got a
bit of a boost after the stockmarket crash in '87.  Apparently the
volume of shares traded was very high, and many financial programs
failed, because the numbers involved were so large that they overflowed
various limits, but the Smalltalk programs kept running, because
Smalltalk quietly switches to using floating point arithmetic when
integer arithmetic overflows.  (Well, that's the rumour anyway.  I
don't know how much truth there is to it.)

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.