Eliminating assignments and variable syntax (accessors)

Hans-Martin Mosner hm.mosner at cityweb.de
Tue Aug 3 19:10:54 UTC 1999


Marcel Weiher wrote:

> The basic idea is to replace the binding of names to variables with
> messaging.
>
> In order to accomplish this, the notion of messaging with implicit
> targets and a lookup chain is introduced.  For example, messages to
> self do not need to be prefixed with 'self'.
>
>         self hi.                        ->      hi.
>         self hi:newHi.  ->      hi:newHi.

....

> I think this sketch addresses most of the issues raised on both
> sides of the debate (and sounds suspiciously like SELF).

This is the (syntactical) core of SELF, and the reason it's got this
name.
Of course, complete SELF is a lot more.

Have you ever noticed how methods and their activations correspond to
classes and their instances? If you take this a little further,
temporaries could be just the instance variables of these
'method-classes'.
It's somewhat funny how this seems to ring the bell 'Simula' in my head
:-)
In that precursor of Smalltalk, objects were a somewhat accidental
by-product of the coroutine feature, that is, an object was created by a
function that just retained its activation, if I remember correctly. But
I may be totally wrong on this one, it's been more than 15 years since
that...

Hans-Martin (wish I had a better memory)





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