Caper needs Self Help

Paul Chapman paul at igblan.free-online.co.uk
Tue Nov 18 13:35:48 UTC 2003


My other message today reveals that I've still been unable to get 
Self running under Cygwin.  So here are a couple of questions about 
Self the answers to which would help me with Caper's semantics.

(1) Is there any use for an inline object-with-code?  It seems to me 
that there isn't, because there is no selector associated with such 
an object, and therefore it's rather difficult to invoke the code.

(2) Conversely, what happens if a keyword slot contains an object-
without-code?  I assume that accessing the object in such a slot by 
sending a keyword message to its container would return (a copy of) 
the object itself with the parameter slots filled in.  Is that right?

I'm trying to work out what the deep meaning of Self's objects-with-
and-without-code is (cf Smalltalk's separation of methods and 
instance variables into two namespaces), in order to find the best 
way for Caper to distinguish between "values" (evaled at definition) 
and "methods" (evaled at invocation) in fields.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Cheers, Paul




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