Prototypes
Mike Klein
mike at twinsun.com
Tue Mar 3 19:49:24 UTC 1998
Craig Latta wrote:
I do think it's a mistake to think that classing is a required
"first principle" of object-orientation; it's just a implementation
detail supporting method lookup that's been around for a long time.
(The really important things for me are messages and autonomous
computational units of state and behavior.)
I agree with this. I wanted to point out a very common and annoying
problem with a lot of Smalltalk code.
Every object has a "hidden" instVar that points to it's class.
The mandates of OO say that we should consider this slot "private".
Yet Object implements the #class method to turn it into essentially
a public instance variable (fortunately read-only).
This seems to "encourage" code that makes decisions based upon the class
of an object.
(Just look at senders of class and isKindOf:, compared
to the less intrusive respondsTo:. I'm not talking about tools such as
the debugger & inspector for which sending #class makes sense.)
-- Mike Klein
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