On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 01:06 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:

> Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> wrote:
>> 2. The reflection protocols - everything that Browser and Inspector 
>> use
>> to look at and change classes and objects, including the ClassBuilder.
>> This might be partially covered by the ANSI suite. It's important
>> because the tools themselves are complex enough right now that it's 
>> not
>> obvious alway obvious how things are done.
>>
>
> There is no reflection in ANSI Smalltalk.
>
>
> -Lex
>
YES YES YES. This is perhaps the most hotly misunderstood
aspect of the ANSI standard. It is a non-reflective declaration
powerful enough to describe a fully reflective runtime program.

Most users of VSE never realized that they were revisioning
non-reflective declarations of very reflective programs. This
declarative technique is the razor's edge by which a "timeless"
configuration of a program may be archived independently
of the very dynamic image in which it was generated.

This is also the reason why ginsu was able to modularize
the image with absolutely no impact on the structure or declaration
of the core image.

But I have said that more than once in this forum.

Redundantly yours,

:-}> John