respondsTo: bug

Chris Cunnington cunnington at sympatico.ca
Tue Dec 18 19:54:15 UTC 2007


On 12/18/07 2:16 PM, "Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> Basically, what you are missing is the distinction between instances and
> classes

The map is not the terrain. The classes are just templates, but people from
the C world think that this is what's real. The instances are what's real.
The classes are not the objects. (The classes are objects but, frankly, who
cares. Metaclasses are somebody else's problem.) The instances are the
objects. In Smalltalk you are dealing with a visible world of classes, which
is false. And the real world of instances, which you can only see through
the windows of the Inspector and the Explorer. You need to learn to see into
two worlds, and not rely on the one, the System Browser, staring you in the
face. The problem is added to, because classes are written to be as general
as possible for maximum reuse. While the instances are as specific as
possible. Unique, in fact. The leap to the dynamicly bound, loose typing
world is weirder than  you think... Not for nothing are we associated with
Lisp. 

Chris 



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