The design and implementation of multilingualized Squeak

This paper describes the design and implementation of multilingualization ("m17n") of a dynamic object-oriented environment called Squeak. The goal of this project is to provide a collaborative and late-bound environment where the users can use many different natural languages and characters. Squeak is a highly portable implementation of a dynamic objects environment and it is a good starting point toward the future collaborative environment. However, its text related classes lack the ability to handle natural languages that require extended character sets such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Korean, and Japanese. We have been implementing the multilingualization extension to Squeak. The extension we wrote can be classified as follows: 1) new character and string representations for extended character sets, 2) keyboard input and the file out of multilingual text mechanism, 3) flexible text composition mechanism, 4) extended font handling mechanisms including dynamic font loading and outline font handling, 5) higher level application changes including a Japanese version of SqueakToys. The resulting environment has the following characteristics: 1) various natural languages can be used in the same context, 2) the pixels on screen, including the appearance of characters can be completely controlled by the program, 3) decent word processing facility for a mixture of multiple languages, 4) existing Squeak capability, such as remote collaborative mechanism will be integrated with it, 5) small memory footprint requirement.