--On Sunday, January 20, 2002 9:54 PM -0500 "Andrew C. Greenberg" 
<werdna at mucow.com> wrote:

> There are zillions of ways to do what you describe, the simplest,  far
> from the most elegant, but far more elegant than this code, would be to
> simply define a default method in Morph (or the GCD of the class
> hierarchy in which you will be working), that does something reasonable.

Well ...

I thought of this. I noticed that the NKConnection Kit adds methods to 
Morph.  Frankly, doing this in my own case bothers me -- a lot.  It 
certainly would work for *me* -- for my own "private" image.  But what if 
*everyone* did this?  Are you really saying that it's OK for everyone who 
has something they want to do in Squeak to add methods to Morph?  If 
everyone does this, there will be method explosion in class Morph that will 
get out of hand in no time flat.  Or else there will be a gazillion 
incompatible images, and no one will be able to know what "the real class 
Morph" does.  Or else there will be a horrendous political process to cull 
all of the add-on methods to Morph for which ones to "bless" in the 
official image.  I really like the idea that my classes can be filed in and 
just work -- there's no messing with anything outside my own class 
definitions, which just use garden variety subclassing.  It seems to me 
that adding methods to Morph should be for functionality that is so useful, 
a very significant percentage of Squeakers are likely to be able to use it. 
As opposed to adding "application level" functionality for *my* quite -- uh 
shall I say "individual" -- set of behaviors.

There really is no less obtrusive class than Morph to which my methods can 
be added if I'm not going to test a morph first to see if it understands my 
methods.  I need to send them to the *owner* of a morph, and I don't want 
to make any assumptions at all about what submorphs that owner might have 
that aren't "my classes".

---
 Jim Rosenberg                      http://www.well.com/user/jer/
     WELL: jer
     Internet: jr at amanue.com