[self-interest] parent arguments

[Russell Allen]

On 13.12.2011 11:23, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> Here is a language feature which I thought we had discussed before,
> but
>  a quick search in this list's archives seems to indicate that we
>  haven't.
>
>  Officially Self has something that I am calling "parent arguments"
> in
>  this email. We tell that story that when a lookup finds a method as
> some
>  slot's value, we clone that method object transforming it into an
>  activation object by changing some of its slots. This includes
> adding a
>  special argument slot called "self" which is set to the receiver of
> the
>  message. This slot not only behaves like an argument, but it also
>  behaves like a parent (which is why it is indicated as :self* in our
>  drawings) and allows the method to access all the slots in the
> receiver.
>
>  There is a similar scheme to explain how blocks work, though the
>  :* slot doen't have a name that is visible through normal
>  message passing (in practice :self* doesn't either since "self" in
> the
>  source text is parsed into a special bytecode instead of as a send
> one).
>
>  Of course, this isn't at all how things are actually implemented.
> But it
>  is the story we tell about the language.
>
>  I was wondering if it wouldn't be interesting to have this as a real
>  feature of Self. Any object could have a parent argument slot and
> that
>  would get filled in with another object whenever it was cloned. So
>
>  w: myWrapper cloneWith: model.
>
>  would do essentially what we can now do with
>
>  w: myWrapper clone. w mParent: model.
>
>  This alternative supposes that myWrapper includes a parent data slot
>  called mParent. The difference is that this data slot can be
> reassigned
>  to some other object at any time while the proposed parent argument
> slot
>  can't be changed (not counting reflection) during that object's
>  lifetime. My idea is that this captures an interesting usage pattern
>  better than assignable parent slots.

Is this a pattern that you're using a lot? I'm not sure how often I 
change an objects parents except at a meta-level through outliners?

Russell

>
>  -- Jecel
>
> 
>
> Links:
> ------
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