Two simple Self questions and one Self design philosophy query

Ben Moseley ben_moseley at mac.com
Wed Jun 16 18:59:19 UTC 2004


Hi,

(Apologies if these are somewhat naive - I'm very new to the Self 
world, but intrigued...)

The first simple question is - suppose I have an object representing a 
table which has four slots to  four other objects representing its 
legs. If I send a "copy" message to this I will by default get a new 
table which shares the legs of the old one (ie - it is a shallow copy).
What is the standard Self idiom for achieving the desired affect? Is it 
to implement a custom "copy" method?

The second simple question: Why does "parent* = traits clonable" work 
on a new - empty - object when initially "traits" can't be found. (By 
this I mean if I have a parent-less object and type "traits" or "traits 
clonable" into its evaluator, I get a debugger). There is obviously 
some boot-strapping going on here - ie the "traits clonable" which is 
used for the parent slot assignment is being evaluated in a different 
environment (one which has access to the lobby?) - I was just wondering 
how it worked.

Finally, Self makes a clear distinction between prototypes which are 
copied (but not inherited from) and traits objects which can be used 
for inheritance whereas some other prototype languages merge the two 
concepts (ie they inherit via their prototypes by default). I know one 
of the original reasons given for the Self approach was to ensure that 
the prototype object was genuinely a prototype of objects cloned from 
it and not special in any way, but I am curious if with hindsight this 
is viewed to be a strength or a weakness of Self. (If this has been 
discussed elsewhere I'd be very grateful for pointers).

Thanks very much,

--Ben





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