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What is a Smalltalk "image"? Is it like serializing a Smalltalk run-time?
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Smalltalk was the first graphical language tool to support live programming and advanced debugging techniques such as on-the-fly inspection and code changes during execution in a very user-friendly format.
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language underpinning the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis".
Smalltalk is a fully object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language with no 'non-object' types. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the “new world” of computing exemplified by “human–computer symbiosis.”
In Smalltalk, everything is an object, and classes act as descriptions of objects. Classes are used to define the set of messages an instance of that class responds to, as well as the variables contained in every instance of that class.
Most popular programming systems separate program code (in the form of class definitions, functions or procedures) from program state (such as objects or other forms of application data). They load the program code when an application is started, and any previous application state has to be recreated explicitly from configuration files or other data sources. Any settings the application programmer doesn't explicitly save, you have to set back up whenever you restart.
Many Smalltalk systems, however, do not differentiate between application data (objects) and code (classes). In fact, classes are objects themselves. Therefore most Smalltalk systems store the entire application state (including both Class and non-Class objects) in an image file. The image can then be loaded by the Smalltalk virtual machine to restore a Smalltalk-like system to a previous state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persistence
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