Alan,

It's delightful to read your comments on Object Models and MOPs -- always
interesting topics to me, and especially useful now as I'm trying to do
some work in this area, with Squeak as the testbed.  One of the regrets of
my 4+ years at Apple, much of it working on dynamic languages (e.g., SK8)
and even located just down the hall from your team, was that I didn't get
to interact more with you and them.  Now, through the marvels of this
mailing list and the active participation of the whole Squeak team, we're
all getting the benefit of that interaction.  Keep the postings (and the
"blue plane" changes to Squeak) coming!

Now a couple questions and an emotional reaction:

Gregor apparently published another book on MOPs by himself after "Art of
the Metaobject Protocol", at MIT Press, titled "Open Implementations and
Metaobject Protocols", in both hardcover (Sept 94, ISBN: 0-262-11192-6) and
paperback (June 95, ISBN: 0-262-61103-1).  But my attempts to get a copy at
all the usual places (MIT Press, Amazon, Stacey's in Palo Alto, and even
the Stanford Bookstore) have failed.  How different is this book from the
"AotMP" (which I have)?  Should I persist in trying to get a copy?

Gregor seems to be pursuing a new topic, "aspect oriented programming".
Any comments on this line of research?  A quick read of the intro web pages
didn't leave me with enough concrete understanding to assess the ideas.

You said:
....But it is really terrible if you just ban such things. That is too
moralistic and smacks of the Wirth school of (non)programming. This is why
well thought out metasystems should allow the good designer/programmer to
have their cake and eat it too. The "Metaobject protocol" by Greg and
Danny, et. al., at PARC is an inspiring further advance in what we had done
there in the '70s, and it gives some tantalizing insights into what could
yet be invented....
Ouch!  How can I clear my name? :-)  Maybe I'll just have to convince you
that Nicklaus is the "call-by-name" Wirth and I'm the "call-by-value" Wirth
:-)

Mike Wirth
IBM Almaden Research Center