Squeak as Metaverse reminds me of something concrete...

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Sat Jul 22 07:48:54 UTC 2000


> I think there is a fundamental semantic issue here. That is, meaning
> emerges out of relationship. See for example, Kent's 1979 book called
> "Data & Reality".
> Available at: http://www.1stbooks.com/ search on Kent
>
> If meaning emerges out of relationship, then it is fundamentally
> impossible for any sort of "object" to exist by itself, let alone carry
> any sort of interpretation around with it.

Indeed.  An object is defined by it's relationships (including the all
important relationship to it's behavior).  Thus, in order to move objects
around with their behavior, you must be able to reference objects beyond the
boundaries of a single image.  And, for practical reasons, you will need to
replicate some objects in multiple locations.  Managing replication by hand
would be difficult to say the least, so some automated mechanism based on
message traffic patterns would be desired.  Wish I had more time to work on
something like this.

XML is very important from a practitioner's point of view, but not very
interesting beyond that.  Given the broad availability of XML parsers, it at
least provides us with a quick and dirty data interchange format.

- Stephen





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list