>As Ken Dickey's suggested (early in this thread) you should take a look
>at SK8.  

SK8 is a great idea mine and authoring environment with years of testing 
& tuning of ideas. 

I would like to point out that SK8's objects are more like Java Beans 
(though more developed and refined).  They were designed for authoring 
and might be considered fairly heavweight for general use.  Thinking of 
something SK8-like in the Squeak base, we should not lose sight of 
Squeak's goals w.r.t. simplicity, generality, etc.  A low-level approach 
giving an easy to use authoring environment using heavier-weight 
prototypes on top of lighter-weight but perhaps more primitive objects is 
also a possible solution.  

I think that it is important to view cool environments like SK8 as idea 
mines but should certainly rethink the ideas in the Squeak context. The 
main thing at the core level is to have the capabilities for building 
higher-level objects which make authoring easy.  If the SK8 (or other) 
object models make sense, we don't neccessarily have to push them down 
into the core feature layer.  The main thing is to minimize the impedance 
mismatch.  In SK8 we wrote a generic code generator which took a 
project/image and wrote the source to regenerate that project in SK8 or 
Java (or whatever).  Java had a big impedance mismatch at the object 
level in that it was a lot of runtime work to implement the SK8 model.  
If Squeak were to support a Prototype model (or perhaps a class-instance 
model with per-instance specialization) the match would certainly be 
better than with Java.

I would definitely suggest that people check out SK8--it is very cool, 
and I love the authoring capabilities--but lets be very careful at the 
same time not to do too much violence to the Squeak ideals in the 
process.  I would rather build a SK8-alike on top of current Squeak than 
wait a year or two for the ultimate Prototype based OO model.

Hey, now that I said all of that, take a look at SK8!  It's GR8!  8^)

[http://sk8.research.apple.com/sk8/sk8.html]

Cheers,
-Ken