Portia: An instance-centered environment for Smalltalk

Smalltalk environments should accommodate programmers' conceptualizations of objects as independent, communicating agents by providing tools that allow them to work directly with instances. This paper discusses the requirements for such an environment, assesses the standard Smalltalk environment in this respect, and describes an enhanced Smalltalk environment called Portia which provides additional facilities for interacting with instances. © 1991, ACM. All rights reserved.