Performing a method on only those objects which will understand
it
Jim Rosenberg
jr at amanue.com
Mon Jan 21 04:04:17 UTC 2002
--On Sunday, January 20, 2002 9:54 PM -0500 "Andrew C. Greenberg"
<werdna at mucow.com> wrote:
> There are zillions of ways to do what you describe, the simplest, far
> from the most elegant, but far more elegant than this code, would be to
> simply define a default method in Morph (or the GCD of the class
> hierarchy in which you will be working), that does something reasonable.
Well ...
I thought of this. I noticed that the NKConnection Kit adds methods to
Morph. Frankly, doing this in my own case bothers me -- a lot. It
certainly would work for *me* -- for my own "private" image. But what if
*everyone* did this? Are you really saying that it's OK for everyone who
has something they want to do in Squeak to add methods to Morph? If
everyone does this, there will be method explosion in class Morph that will
get out of hand in no time flat. Or else there will be a gazillion
incompatible images, and no one will be able to know what "the real class
Morph" does. Or else there will be a horrendous political process to cull
all of the add-on methods to Morph for which ones to "bless" in the
official image. I really like the idea that my classes can be filed in and
just work -- there's no messing with anything outside my own class
definitions, which just use garden variety subclassing. It seems to me
that adding methods to Morph should be for functionality that is so useful,
a very significant percentage of Squeakers are likely to be able to use it.
As opposed to adding "application level" functionality for *my* quite -- uh
shall I say "individual" -- set of behaviors.
There really is no less obtrusive class than Morph to which my methods can
be added if I'm not going to test a morph first to see if it understands my
methods. I need to send them to the *owner* of a morph, and I don't want
to make any assumptions at all about what submorphs that owner might have
that aren't "my classes".
---
Jim Rosenberg http://www.well.com/user/jer/
WELL: jer
Internet: jr at amanue.com
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