Slate was designed with these issues in mind, and in our opinion has a
fairly good integrated solution for them. I don't need to expound, the
website whose address I've named here a few times explains all of this,
with the programmers' manual being the best source lately. Have either of
you really looked at it?

On Sat, 23 Nov 2002, Stephane Ducasse wrote:

> What could be a start would be to remove instance variable accesses and
> have only message send
> even if the compiler should inline them.
>
> Stef
>
> On samedi, novembre 23, 2002, at 03:58  pm, Stephen Pair wrote:
>
> > It's fun to think about ways of simplifying syntax.  In some ways, I
> > like Self's implicit "self"...I also like thinking about blocks (and
> > how
> > to reconcile them with normal methods).  Blocks are different from
> > methods in the following ways:
> >
> > - they are not in the method dictionary
> > - they do not have a name (and are not called by name)
> > - they have access to the activation state of their home method
> > - they have different syntax for expressing them
> >
> > There are probably other differences...but I like to think about these
> > differences and then try and envision a syntax (and perhaps a meta
> > model) that would accommodate methods and blocks in a more general way.
> >
> > Also, making the "self" keyword implicit has the effect of making
> > portions of your code look more functional in nature (even though it's
> > no less object oriented).  A full listing of the methods for a given
> > object would look strikingly similar to a nicely designed C program
> > where all of the functions in a given source file are designed to
> > operate on a given set of variables that are global to the code in that
> > source file (and which point to the elements of a structure).
> >
> > - Stephen

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water at tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/