on 3/30/01 3:35 AM, Alan Kay at Alan.Kay at disney.com wrote:

> Most importantly, class Class was an instance of itself, and class
> Object was a superclass of itself. The "magic of microcode" was what
> allowed those two relations to be circular. The explicit metaclasses
> of Smalltalk-80 really don't do enough work to justify their
> complexity IMNSHO. But, wait until after this summer .....
> 


What will come after this summer;)
Nathanael plans to work on that?
This would be really great.

By the way, metaclasses are implicit in Smalltalk-80 not explicit ;)

I have the impression that a lot of other approaches could be experimented
like the idea of pluggable metaclass that would decouple different meta
aspect from the class. (I do not have a paper on that just discussed with
Gilad Bracha from Sun).





> Cheers,
> 
> Alan
> 
> At 9:08 PM -0500 3/29/01, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
>> On Thursday 29 March 2001 18:42, Stephen Pair wrote:
>>> ÝAre there any papers (or code) for Smalltalk-76 on the web? ÝI'm sure
>>> Ýthey've been announced before (and wasn't there an implementation of
>>> Ýit for Squeak?), but I've forgotten.
>> 
>> This one is great:
>> 
>> 
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/St76/Smalltalk76ProgrammingSystem.ht
m>> l
>> 
>> but doesn't mention meta-classes. On page 34 of Alan Kay's "The Early
>> History of Smalltalk" paper there is a drawing labeled "Smalltalk-76
>> Metaphysics". All classes were instances of the class Class object,
>> which was a subclass of the class Object. Little Smalltalk initially
>> had the same design (which makes all classes have the exact same set of
>> class methods) but has moved to a more Smalltalk-80-like system in
>> version 4.






>> There is a simulation in Squeak of Smalltalk-72, not 76.
>> 
>> -- Jecel
>