Stephane Ducasse wrote:

> I found that lot of people were confused by the second test. I have the
> impression that super is cognitively overloaded and should have be be
> called overriden or callNextMethod as in clos.
> For now I got only three good answers including mine :).

Ok, now that I've demonstrated that I don't know the message sending
semantics of Outlook Express--i.e. the difference between "send message to
sender" and "send message to list" ;-) I might as well provide my 2 cents...
(Or rather I should say: I know the difference very well but keep making
this mistake.)

I think it is understandable that people consider "super" to be a different
object than self, since it appears to be a different referent, to use the
linguistic term.  By changing the name you appear to change the referent but
you actually change the message lookup which is something much more subtle.

Personally, I resorted to my knowledge of some very low-level stuff in the
vm to figure it out.

I suspect that you can construct this kind of riddle in any language--but
it's a lot easier in some languages ;-) But this difficulty is rarely a
problem in practice I suspect? I doubt that there are many Smalltalkers who
ever get bitten by this.

Henrik