neo alternative (was: mirrors)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Baltasar,

> > I have adopted a different solution for Neo Smalltalk, so I can
> > certainly understand that no everybody likes this solution.
> 
> Could please explain your approach ? Or just paste some links ...

Just the "reflection is a special viewpoint" approach suggested in the
Us paper (still available online, as Reinout Heeck kindly corrected me
about a month ago: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/smith96simple.html).

When you deal with an object in most contexts it will be missing all the
meta-level methods, but when you switch to a special viewpoint then it
will seem as if an extra set of methods have been added to the object
(overriding any methods with the same names that the object might have
already have) and you can do debugging and programming environment kinds
of things with it.

Personally I find the mirror approach cleaner. But I have had
discussions with several programmers who had difficulty understanding
the indirection in that design and my system is supposed to be suitable
for children.

-- Jecel