[self-interest] Bold outliner items

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Fri Feb 7 01:39:59 UTC 2014


Russell Allen wrote:

> Slots can be marked as public or private (or unmarked). This is purely
> documentational and not enforced at all, but slots marked public get
> bolded by outlines.

This is true in Self 4.x but wasn't the case in Self 1 and 2 where the
privacy declaration made a difference in slot lookup. A private slot
would be found be an implicit self send but not by a normal send. This
meant that "mumble" and "self mumble" might do different things (note
that they still might if 'mumble' is a temporary variable in the current
method, but that is a different issue).

Unfortunately this privacy stuff combined with parent priorities and the
tie breaker rule to make it really hard for programmers to guess what a
piece of code would do. So it was all ripped out in Self 3 until a
proper solution could be found but the privacy declarations remained as
a kind of comment to be ignored by the VM. The proper solution was Us
(do we have a link to the relevant papers for that on the site?).

-- Jecel




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