[squeak-dev] On class/metaclass coupling

Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com
Tue Dec 8 13:59:35 UTC 2009


2009/12/8 Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu>:
> If you haven't done this already, you should look up Actalk, which was
> a version of Smalltalk that let you have many classes with the same
> metaclass.
>
> http://map.squeak.org/package/19ae332d-1111-4131-8b56-1fd7e9d2b35f
>
> I never used Actalk, I just read the papers.  It was an interesting
> and worthwhile experiment, but I wasn't convinced that the change was
> worthwhile.  But perhaps we just need to figure out more to do with
> it.
>
> What you are saying is a little different.  You are just complaining
> about hardcoding the assumption that each clas has a unique metaclass.
>  All you are really asking is to get rid of the "thisClass" variable.
> I don't see any harm in that.  I bet that "new" is rarely called more
> than once on any metaclass, and that one time is during the creation
> of the class/metaclass pair.  The bigger issue is that when you
> evaluate and print the expression "Object class", what happens is that
> it computes the metaclass and then asks the metaclass to print itself,
> which it does by fetching the name of its sole instance and appending
> " class" to it.  In other words, a metaclass does not have a name, but
> derives its name from the name of its sole instance.  But this doesn't
> have to be fast, either.  You could call allInstances to find out the
> instance and get its name.  My guess is that it would hardly be
> noticeable.
>

My own guess is that there would be a noticeable down speed in code
management tools (Monticello & al).

Nicolas

> Making this change would not cause metaclasses to have more than one
> instance, but would make it easier for people to change things so it
> would.
>
> -Ralph
>
>



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