[squeak-dev] On class/metaclass coupling

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Tue Dec 8 14:12:22 UTC 2009


2009/12/8 Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>:
> 2009/12/8 Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com>:
>> 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
>>
>
> Posted too fast...
> Beside, if it has several instances, then why insisting on giving a
> name related to a specific instance ?
>

i second that.

If problem is only about identifying metaclass by name, then
why not just add a 'name' ivar to metaclass, and let metaclass to
print itself with whatever name it desire?


> Nicolas
>


-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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