on 3/30/01 4:31 PM, Bijan Parsia at bparsia at email.unc.edu wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> [snip]
>> By the way, metaclasses are implicit in Smalltalk-80 not explicit ;)
> [snip]
> They're *anonymous* and "automatically created when you create a
> class". Does that entail that they are implicit?

Literature :)

> While their creation is implicit in class creation (or rather part of
> class creation is to create an anonymous metaclasses), it seems that
> metaclasses are fully explicit parts (ok, entering rocky linguistic
> waters) of the system (i.e., they are real objects, you could name them,
> they are retrieved not lazily created, etc.).
> 
> Of course, at this point, I'm sure there's some precisie, technical
> meaning that I just don't know, but I'd like to!

So the excellent paper: Safe Metaclass Composition of OOPSLA
http://www.emn.fr/info/perso/ledoux/publis.html


> Cheers,
> Bijan Parsia.
>