On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, Alan Kay wrote:

> I agree Andreas -- but we could also point the finger at Smalltalk-80 and
> ask why doesn't it have a slot class that would allow us to change the
> meaning without having to worry about what the code looks like ...

It sounds like the ideal situation would be to have a single standard way
of accessing variables in source code, such that trivial accessor/mutator
methods of the "^var" or "var := param" form would *never* need to be
written.  So, all you'd have to do is add a (non-trivial) accessor or
mutator method, and then all variable accesses would be funneled through
these, without having to change any source code. 

I guess this must be how slots work in Self?  (I wish I still had a Sun,
so I could try out Self myself... :) ) 

(There would then still need to be an alternate way of accessing the
variable directly in the cases where it was necessary to avoid an existing
accessor/mutator method, but this use would be less common, and very
private, and the source to do this should be more verbose than the
standard access described above.  I guess this is more or less what
Andreas Raab just said in his last post.) 

It would be fantastic if something like this eventually made it into
Squeak... it would render this current argument obsolete.  I don't know
offhand what the best implementation would be, though.  And it's obviously
more of a blue-plane thing, and very non-ANSI compliant. :) 

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
  http://www.transom.com
  dway at eai.com, dway at mat.net