Is printing meta?

[xanadu!hibbert at uunet.UU.NET]

Those are good points, John.  Besides making it more
obvious how to find the code, the reason I think
printing belongs in the object is that it necessarily
involves looking in the guts at the detailed state.
(There are times when you want to print different amounts
of information depending on who's asking, but I think
the way to detect that is by using different messages
to ask.)  If you have mirrors (really should be lenses or
windows) then they have to ask the object for the information
anyway, and so you've reduced to the previous problem anyway.
The object itself is the only thing that can really know
enough to construct a reasonable representation.

I didn't understand what you meant in your last line:
>>  mirrors are a lot like views, which
>>  are considered bad (at least in the UI)

I thought that the idea of Views as in MVC was still
considered to be a good one.  Having objects that are
in charge of knowing how to display others that respond
to a given protocol (or can be made to by some mediating
object) is a real win.  Are you talking about some other
facet of the idea of views, or are there more recent
evaluations of the general idea that I haven't seen yet?

Chris