On Jan 25, 2008, at 15:48 , itsme213 wrote:

> "Igor Stasenko" <siguctua at gmail.com> wrote in message
>>> Would something like that be relevant to not breaking the  
>>> inheritance of
>>> the
>>> metaclass hierarchy?
>>>
>>
>> I heard about this a while ago. IIRC perl having per-object behavior
>> customization.
>> But this can be easily made , when object model is prototype based
>> (perl/javascript).
>> And in ST we having a class-based model.
>> Btw, can you show us a 'killer' use case of such language feature,
>> which shows great benefit comparing to class-based model? I'm very
>> intrigued. :)
>
> Ruby is a class-based, not a prototype-based language. It allows  
> per-object
> customization by silently inserting a per-object class only where  
> needed,
> but does not go the next step with the required "self" magic of a
> prototype-based language. Smalltalk can do this easily (perhaps not as
> conveniently as Ruby) e.g. Avi has a package on SqueakSource called
> Prototype, I think.


FWIW this is exactly what Etoys does (which implements a fat object  
model on top of Squeak).

- Bert -