On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
[snip]
> By the way, metaclasses are implicit in Smalltalk-80 not explicit ;)
[snip]
They're *anonymous* and "automatically created when you create a
class". Does that entail that they are implicit?

While their creation is implicit in class creation (or rather part of
class creation is to create an anonymous metaclasses), it seems that
metaclasses are fully explicit parts (ok, entering rocky linguistic
waters) of the system (i.e., they are real objects, you could name them,
they are retrieved not lazily created, etc.).

Of course, at this point, I'm sure there's some precisie, technical
meaning that I just don't know, but I'd like to!

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.