Steve Dekorte <steve at dekorte.com> wrote:
> "Jarvis, Robert P." <Jarvisb at timken.com> wrote:
> > AFAK they can support the same functionality.  I guess I
> > don't see that prototypes have any great advantages over 
> > properly implemented classes..

I forgot to explain what protos are.

Think about the transition from functional to class-based languages
like simula. What happended? State and behavior got closer together.

Then came Smalltalk. What happened? The behavior got (essentially)
stuck into associative arrays, so you didn't statically link to methods -
you called them dynamically. But you still had static connections to
state(variables) in your methods.

Then came the prototype-based langauges. They just finished what Smalltalk
started. They put both state and behavior for an object into an associative
array. 

It's a natural progression.

Steve