Sina/st

Sina/st is an interpreter for the Sina programming language that runs on top of ParcPlace Smalltalk. Sina is an object-oriented language originally designed by the Twente Research and Education on Software Engineering (TRESE) at the University of Twente, Holland. It is designed around a concept called the "Composition Filters Object Model" which is a layering abstraction that simplifies the creation and interactions of objects by using input and output filters, allowing you to define mechanism for inheritance, delegation, reflection and persistence in a uniform way. The strong point of Sina was always taken to be "programming in the large" since it solves some of the problems traditionally associated with O-O languages such as code dangling but another plus is the abstraction of message-passing systems which is especially crucial for concurrent programming, although it should be noted that the last known version of Sina does not explicitly support any form of concurrent message passing.

Otherwise Sina is a fairly ordinary O-O language with features like inheritance, encapsulation, and abstract data types with the exception that later versions add some interesting database access features.

There was an alternative version of Sina available from TRESE that was implemented in C++ but it was not as polished as Sina/st and appears to have disappeared.

Version

• Last known version: 3.1

Note that all Sina/st implementations are shipped in two versions labelled PC and UNIX, you should use the UNIX one on OS/2, the PC one is identical to the UNIX one except that it conforms to the 8.3 file naming conventions and should only be used with ParcPlace Smalltalk-80 on DOS although it works on the other implementations.

Prerequisites

• ParcPlace Smalltalk-80 version 4 or higher or ParcPlace ObjectWorks/VisualWorks version 1 or higher

Links & publications

• The Sina language homepage - Outdated
• Sina/st User guide v3.1 - via Archive.org - In Postscript format
• Piet S. Koopmans: On the Definition and Implementation of the Sina/st Language - 1995 - In PDF format.
• Anand Triphathi, Eric Berge and Mehmet Akşit: An Implementation of the Object-oriented Concurrent Programming Language SINA - 1989
• Anand Triphathi and Mehmet Akşit: Data Abstraction Mechanisms in Sina/st - 1988
• Anand Triphathi and Mehmet Akşit: Communication, scheduling and resource management in SINA - 1988
• Sinan Vural and Mehmet Akşit: An Object-Oriented Language-Database Integration Model: The Composition-Filters Approach - 1992 - In Postscript or PDF format.
• Ken Wakita, Jan Bosch, , Lodewijk Bergmans, Akinori Yonezawa and Mehmet Akşit: Abstracting Object Interactions Using Composition Filters - In PDF format.
• Lodewijk Bergmans, Bedir Tekinerdogan & Mehmet Akşit: Modular and Composable Extensions to Smalltalk using Composition Filters - In PDF format

Author & publisher

• TRESE
• Mehmet Aksit
• Piet S. Koopmans