>There is a good article talking about 'Classes versus Prototypes' by Antero
>Taivalsaari in JOOP Nov/Dec 97 Vol 10, No7.  It is a good introductory
>article that also cover the historical and philosophical background of class
>based and prototype based approach. I would recommend beginner to read it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I haven't read that article but I think highly of Antero. He did
an excellent dissertation on prototype-based languages and designed
and implemented a prototype-based Forth derivative called Kevo.

One of the most complete explorations of prototype-based programming
was the Self project, which ran for nearly ten years, first at Stanford
and then at Sun Laboratories. An early paper, "Self: The Power of
Simplicity" appeared at OOPSLA '87 and later papers described how to
build large programming systems using prototypes. See, for example:

David Ungar, Randall B. Smith: Self: The Power of Simplicity.
OOPSLA 1987: 227-242 

Craig Chambers, David Ungar, Elgin Lee: An Efficient Implementation of SELF-
a Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Language Based on Prototypes.
OOPSLA 1989: 49-70

Randall B. Smith, Mark Lentczner, Walter R. Smith, Antero Taivalsaari, David Ungar: Prototype-Based Languages: Object Lessons from Class-Free Programming (Panel). OOPSLA 1994: 102-112 

Randall B. Smith, John Maloney, David Ungar: The Self-4.0 User Interface:
Manifesting a System-wide Vision of Concreteness, Uniformity and Flexibility.
OOPSLA 1995: 47-60

You can check http://self.sunlabs.com/ but I wasn't able to access
it just now so it may have been taken down. Postscript versions of many
of the Self papers can be found there.

	-- John