On Friday, April 11, 2003, at 12:01  PM, Swan, Dean wrote:
> 	You also must consider that as a steward of the "kernel", inquiries 
> about such interesting research topics coming from you can no longer 
> be "innocent inquiries".
Exactly. Any form of 'authority' brings with it a sometimes onerous 
burden of having to be very careful what you say.

On a more practical point, the idea of using self-like messages to 
define instance variables would be acceptable IFF those messages were 
properly private. In order to provide this privacy one would need to 
implement some mechanism to allow properly private methods and the same 
mechanism would (very likely) solve the worries about overly public 
methods already in the system. I'd be quite happy to see such a privacy 
mechanism if anyone has good ideas.

tim
-- 
tim at sumeru.stanford.edu