Self parents (was: the monopoly of classes)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Sat May 24 00:04:57 UTC 2003


On Friday 23 May 2003 07:23, jan ziak wrote:
> i disagree with you that Self is a purely classless OO language,
> because each object has its parent (a field pointing to some parental
> object). the parental reference seems to me to be very similar to
> "super" (which points to the super-class of an object) in smalltalk.

Objects don't have to have any parents in Self and I often create ones 
that don't. They can have as many parents as you want and the reason 
why most have exactly one is that Self programmers all (including me) 
had extensive previous experience with other Smalltalks and adopted a 
familiar style instead of exploring alternatives.

At the implementation level, there are things called "maps" which do the 
job of indicating type and storing common information that are normally 
handled by classes. But this is totally invisible to the programmers 
and so doesn't count.

-- Jecel



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