Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 00:03:54 +0200 From: rainer@physik3.gwdg.de (Rainer Blome) To: self-interest@self.sunlabs.com Subject: macros / code construction

yes, i know, macros as in the lisp family are a very unstructured way of doing things. i don't actually care for macros, any way to make convenient the use of useful but awkward idioms would do.

i have heard about beta's facilities in that direction but have only just printed the tutorial out, so i can't comment on that. (as always: no library -> no book on beta :-( ) i like the common lisp/loops method combination stuff, so i guess i'll like beta, too.

there are more things that i miss in self: local methods and evaluation of literals in the dynamic context (dynamic? lexical? what does lexical mean anyway, when we don't have source-code anymore?).

imagine doing assignment another way. assignment is a hack (from the functional point of view). it manipulates its context. one should make that explicit by revealing the reflection involved in assignment. first get an object that represents the place (the slot). that is the reflective part. then send it a normal message with the new value as an argument:

(reflect: self slot: "x") store: 1

(buggy, but you know what i mean. how the slot implements the `store:' method? don't you ask! ;-)

of course, this is to be put as a method in the `assignment slot'. now this `slot:' (meta-) message will always eval to the same object (the `x' slot), so it should not be computed every time the assignment method is called.

note that the method now _explicitly_ `knows' the slot it refers to, as opposed to knowing that implicitly by reflecting on its (the method's) own slot name. randy and dave mentioned a very similar way to implement assignment in their ecoop95 paper.

to make this scheme feasible, two things are missing (that means, i can't see them, *I* might be missing them, not self, tell me if i do.):

a way to do computation during initialization

a convenient way to construct code. writing this kind of assignment methods must be automated.

this is long already, i'll stop here. any thoughts? am i making sense?

rainer