An Introduction To Smalltalk Via "10000 factorial"
written by Peter William Lount
version 1, 20041008 10:25am PDT

Andy writes
Then let us introduce you to Smalltalk, which has had out of the box large integers since at least Smalltalk-80 (i.e. 1980). Most Smalltalk versions support unlimited length integers and other numeric wonders such as Fractions.

In a fraction like the numerator and denomenator are remembered since the Fraction is an object like everything else in Smalltalk.

Naturally Fraction object instances understand numerator and denomenator messages! produces: and produces:
To find the factorial of a number simply type in the following into a Smalltalk workspace, select it and use the menu or keyboard command "print it" to execute the code and print it in the workspace (use "inspect it" or "explore it" to open an inspector or explorer window): which will produce a number with 35,660 digits which you can see here.
The Smalltalk source code for the Integer "factorial" method, which uses recursion, is:
You could have a fraction with a large denominator such as: which produces a fraction like so:
To convert it to a Float use: which will produce: in the familar limited precision Float representation.

These examples were computed in Squeak Smalltalk.

There are plenty of free online Smalltalk books available to learn Smalltalk from, and a number of freely available versions of Smalltalk for you to download and try out. Additional resources for learning Smalltalk are available. Check them out.

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