> Personally, I view this as a bug. Not having an object indirection pointer
> makes doing "Object become:" highly inefficent.

Java doesn't have the equivalent of "become", and never will (or so I've
been told by a Sun JVM insider).

Besides, a direct-pointer #become: can be pretty efficient (see the one in
Squeak for example) under the right conditions.

> Without a very efficent "become:" it's gets MUCH harder to do transparent
> proxying, which is real handy for distributing your objects across networks or
> storage devices.

Sigh.  Been there, suffered that.  It's the main reason why I infuriate my
boss by refusing point-blank to do any (distributed systems) research
prototyping whatsoever in Java.  The only languages that I've had positive
experiences with in this area are Smalltalk and Objective Caml.  (In C++ and
friends I usually end up implementing the equivalent of an object table and
hiding everything behind smart pointers -- something else that's impossible
to do transparently in Java.)  Sad, but c'est la vie.

End of off-topic ramble...

Ian