>
> There's a big difference between a human reader being able to tell the 
> relationships and a program being able to tell.  I'm not a fan of 
> manifest typing in the usual Java/C++ sense, but I will note that 
> essentially every large scale Smalltalk business framework I have ever 
> seen or heard about has an extensive metamodel that does exactly what 
> Andreas is talking about: it programatically encodes the relationships 
> between (a subset of) the classes in the system.  This gets used all 
> over the place: generating UI, persistence, searching/indexing, 
> integrity constraints, and so on.
>
> The only question I have is whether we need "a" static type system in 
> Squeak (by that definition of static type system), or whether we're 
> better off with the current situation, which is to have many static 
> type systems, all tuned to a particular problem domain.  I'd like to 
> think that the first would work - it would save a lot of time and 
> effort - but suspect there may be a lot of value to the second.

I do not think that static typing will help because you will need 
anyway the first point you mention: a domain-meta model
on top of which you will build UI....

Or you should try MDA/MDE but I think that people are dreaming too much 
about what MDE (model driven engineering)
can give you.

Stef