This book provides reference information for the VAST development environment. This book is designed to explain the concepts and functionality of the VAST subsystems. Some subtle or seldom-used aspects of each subsystem are not described in this book.

VAST Base overview provides you with a general understanding of how the core of VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) is structured, and should be read first. Each of the remaining chapters describes a specific VAST subsystem and can be read in any order.

Because VAST Platform is based on several industry standard programming interfaces, familiarity with these standards is helpful, although not essential, to understanding the VAST subsystems. An understanding of the X Window System Xlib graphics model is helpful when programming Common Graphics operations. Similarly, familiarity with the X Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt) and the OSF/Motif Widget set (Xm) is helpful when programming Common Widgets. The Common File System is based on POSIX.1 (UNIX) file system interfaces. The Common Language Data Types, Common Language Implementation, and Common Process Model are primarily based on the interfaces described in the Smalltalk-80 "Blue Book" and IBM "Red Book."