Re: The Foundation of OO (XDb)

"Michael N. Christoff" <mchristoff_at_sympatico.ca> wrote:
> "Mats Helander" <mats_at_urbantalk.se> wrote in message
> news:3d0901d0_at_news.wineasy.se...
>> What positive ends do you aspire to meet by confusing your vocabulary?
>>
>> Everybody already knows that object = instance of a class. No need to get
>> ïnto any debates over *that*...
>>
>> If you would like some term for some thingy inbetween objects and classes
>> (although for the life of me I can't understand what you would want that
>> thing to be) then why not invent a new word for it instead of trying to
>> reuse terms that we are all already very familiar with the semantics of?
>
> I agree that he should make up a new word. However, James, you should take
> a look at how Javascript handles objects using prototypes. It sounds very
> similar to what you are proposing.
>
> http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/JavaScript/Tutorial/objects.html
>
> Search for the heading "Creating Objects". I'd be interested to hear your
> comments on how your system differs from it.

The characteristic language involving this sort of thing is Self. <http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/labs/oocsb/self/release/Self-4.0/Tutorial/>

  "The Self language doesn't have any classes. When we want a new    object, we find an existing one and copy it. We can then change the    copy, safe in the knowledge that we have not affected anything    else."

But note that this means that Self _rejects_ the notion of "classes." It being an object-oriented system, that means that "classes" cannot be an intrinsic thing to OO.

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