Leandro Caniglia wrote:
> 
> Les.--
>     I like your thoughts about using category
>     theory in Smalltalk!
> 
> What do you mean with 'category theory'? Are you thinking
> about mathematical categories (objects, arrows, functors,
> etc)?
> 
> /Leandro

See Alek's message about that. Like I say in my own message,
I'm not that familiar with it, although Alek's comments
reminded me of something that I once had in mind.

If you are wondering what I meant by my own comments, that
could be very different from category theory for all that I
know.  What I had in mind was making Roles into a part of
the normal Smalltalk model, alongside such things as Classes
and methods, and considering a different approach to building
classes that did not involve the classes having the inheritance
relationships, but rather having the Roles carry those.  Whether
that would ever actually amount to anything I have no idea.

I think that this is possible in Squeak or VisualWorks because
about the only vm requirement for method lookup is that the method
dictionary be found in a particular slot of an object's "class".
Beyond that, there is almost no requirement that the "class" be
a, uh, "Class".  So, it could be a Role instead.

I'm sure that there would be other problems with this- but then,
the notion is that as far as I the programmer know, I am composing
the class out of Roles.  The underlying mechanisms supporting
such a virtuality can be very different from what the programmer
percieves.

-les