That makes sense. In fact, I suspected the answer had to do with late
binding. That's why Nextstep and Objective-C was IMHO the best development
environment. (Smalltalk, at least Squeak, UI development is still a bit
rough but I can see the potential for the same ease-of-development).

> From: Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu>

> Dan Olsen talks about this in his new book on "Developing User Interfaces"
> (Morgan-Kaufman, 1998).  I don't think I grok all the subtleties, but I'll
> try to relate the story.  The self-reflective and late-binding nature of
> Smalltalk allows you to create views that are more de-coupled from their
> models.  For example, when a textbox sends #getText to its model, it
> doesn't care what the model is, as long as it can respond to getText -- you
> can even swap the model at run-time, and as long as the message is
> answerable, it all works.  Olsen contrasts this with C/C++ where the
> compiler requires the model and view to be linked together at compile time,
> the types have to match, etc.  Java can do this de-coupled model-view, too,
> but it had to invent (overly-complex, IMHO) inner classes to make it work.

Jim
-- 
Jim Menard   jimm at io.com   http://www.io.com/~jimm/   BeOS developer #1283
"The human mind is a dangerous plaything, boys. When it's used for evil, 
 watch out! But when it's used for good, then things are much nicer." 
    -- The Tick