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6.2.4 Closing thoughts

You’ve seen how Smalltalk provides you with some very powerful data structures. You’ve also seen how Smalltalk itself uses these same facilities to implement the language. But this is only the tip of the iceberg—Smalltalk is much more than a collection of “neat” facilities to use. The objects and methods which are automatically available are only the beginning of the foundation on which you build your programs—Smalltalk allows you to add your own objects and methods into the system, and then use them along with everything else. The art of programming in Smalltalk is the art of looking at your problems in terms of objects, using the existing object types to good effect, and enhancing Smalltalk with new types of objects. Now that you’ve been exposed to the basics of Smalltalk manipulation, we can begin to look at this object-oriented technique of programming.