Dynamic Scoping & Context Based Behavior (was: Dynamic scoping)

Anthony Hannan ajh18 at cornell.edu
Thu Jan 30 17:55:55 UTC 2003


Hi Stephen,

Your describing perspectives/layers/subject-orientation.  See:

[Us]  Randall B. Smith and David Ungar. A Simple and Unifying Approach
to Subjective Objects. Theory and Practice of Object Systems
2(3):161-178, 1996.  http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/smith96simple.html

[PerspectiveS]  Robert Hirschfeld and Matthias Wagner.  PerspectiveS -
AspectS with Context.  2002. 
http://www-ia.tu-ilmenau.de/~hirsch/Projects/Squeak/PerspectiveS/Perspec
tiveS.html

Cheers,
Anthony

"Stephen Pair" <spair at acm.org> wrote:
> One of the interesting possibilities that dynamic scoping might present
> is that it could be used to set a "behavioral context."  Currently
> Squeak has only one global "behavioral context"...which is to say that
> all objects exhibit the same behavior (roughly speaking) under all
> runtime situations in which any given may find itself.
> 
> With some modification to the message binding algorithm and the
> structure of object memory, I think you could construct a system where
> objects could exhibit different behaviors when being utilized in
> different runtime "behavioral contexts."
> 
> Every object would have some behavior that it exhibits in the global
> (default) behavioral context.  Additionally, you could add behavior (and
> corresponding state) that an object would only exhibit when it is being
> utilized from within a specific runtime behavioral context.
> 
> A real world analogy is that people, when in different contexts, often
> exhibit different behavior.
> 
> A good example is a domain object that exhibits GUI rendering behavior
> when utilized in the "Morphic" behavioral context.  Upon first
> utilization in the Morphic context, the object would adopt the rendering
> behavior and state that you had previously defined for all objects of
> its class.  This would eliminate the need to have two separate objects
> for the model and the view, yet still have all of the benefits of
> model-view separation.  Furthermore, if you had different morphic
> applications for which different renderings were required for the same
> domain object, each application could define its own behavioral context
> (which would each inherit from the Morphic context).  Method lookup
> would first look for methods in the specific behavioral context, and
> then follow an inheritance chain of behavioral contexts, with the global
> default behavioral context being the root of this heirarchy.
> 
> - Stephen



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list