Steve Dekorte wrote:
> 
> You really don't have to "throw away" anything. From a "class"
> consumer's point of view, there's no difference between a class
> and a proto with the clone method renamed "new".

I think in practice you will have to remember at least that there's 
protos and protos that act like classes.

You have (I mean Steve D.), in the Objective-C case, been advocating
similar changes, and in fact some implementations of Objective-C have been
changing somewhat to arrange methods not to be grouped in classes, and
changing the way instances are created. 

Was is it in the end worth it? Did we win anything by adding methods that
have "new" as special case?

In my opinion, no.  I just stick with how it originally was (in my
implementation of Objective-C) as in Stepstone ICpak. 

I like the way it's class based, and in fact, for extensions, I use Squeak
as *reference* implementation. 

That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes design a class with the
prototype/clone paradigm for creating new instances, but it is not because
something _sometimes_ is convenient and a good idea, that you have to make
a *global* transformation to use it "everywhere".