Is Printing Meta?

[jmaloney at cs.washington.edu]

(apologies to those who have seen this twice; i sent to the
wrong list the first time...)

Gee, I dunno. I always liked having objects in charge of printing
themselves. As a programmer, I always knew where to look for the
printOn: method and writing "foo printString" is more concise
than "foo mirror printString", or whatever it would be. Finally,
"meta" anything often confuses beginning programmers because they
think it must be more profound than it really is.

Maybe I don't have the context to understand the philosphical issue
here but it seems to me that mirrors are a lot like views, which
are considered bad (at least in the UI)...

	-- John