Hi

I read the paper on declarative Smalltalk with great interest.
Do you know if this is possible to have more details. More paper, sample
of code showing the difference.... 

Is it possible to play with Team/V? 

Then I have questions:
	- what are the things that we can do in imperative Smalltalk
	that we cannot do in declarative one?
	
	 I was thinking for example: method wrappers (like in VW where
	the method dictionary is directly modified and where Method bytes code
	is changed while installing them) or changing the class of an object
	to introduce Behavior instance to allow instance based programming 
	(like in CodA for example). 
	
	- is the declarative Smalltalk would need a clean MOP for 
	allowing the same possibility than imperative Smalltalk?

	
About the separation of reflective aspects and base level
fucntionality in Smalltalk.  I discussed with Gilad Bracha about the
work they made in Strongtalk or another Smalltalk in the past.  In
particular, they have introduced interesting ways to deal with the separation
of reflective aspects of Smalltalk.

(apparently in the way of Self - to be checked) they introduced mirror
objects.  A mirror object was responsible to certain aspect of a
class.  For example, introspection, reflection, remote debugging....

Several mirrors could be associated to one class.  A mirror was never
invoked from the class itself to limit class dependency.  Apparently
mirror were built on sort of layers (not sure). They redesigned
completely Behavior to remove as much as possible of the reflection
and to move it in specific mirror. The only link was superclass.  Then
they could really separate functionality.

I asked gilad if they have a report or paper on the Mirror but thye don't.
They were just switching to Java after. 


stef

Stephane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
"if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do 
different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today 
might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

University of Bern, Institut fuer informatik and Mathematik
IAM-SCG, 10 neubruckstrasse, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.