Need feedback on simple idea

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Apr 11 19:51:45 UTC 2003


> On Friday, April 11, 2003, at 12:01  PM, Swan, Dean wrote:
>> 	You also must consider that as a steward of the "kernel", inquiries 
>> about such interesting research topics coming from you can no longer 
>> be "innocent inquiries".
> Exactly. Any form of 'authority' brings with it a sometimes onerous 
> burden of having to be very careful what you say.
>
> On a more practical point, the idea of using self-like messages to 
> define instance variables would be acceptable IFF those messages were 
> properly private. In order to provide this privacy one would need to 
> implement some mechanism to allow properly private methods and the 
> same mechanism would (very likely) solve the worries about overly 
> public methods already in the system. I'd be quite happy to see such a 
> privacy mechanism if anyone has good ideas.

Nathanael is playing with a really nice model to introduce a kind of 
'open'
privacy mechanism based on explicit interfaces that a class could 
present to clients
(not a java like interface). Once this will be ready for feedback we 
will certainly let people play with it and we will have some papers 
about that.
My original question was related to that but I did not want to explain 
the complete picture. The idea of removing direct access is a 
discussion we got internally for at least two years and I simply wanted 
to see other opinion that ours. That's why I would like to understand 
the point made that the Brian (the Slate guy) and Jecel as it seems 
that they got a lot of experience with that.

stef



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