Re: categorizing traits objects

[self@ifki50.informatik.fh-muenchen.de]

Hello John,

thanks for your quick reply.

>   1. Privacy is no longer supported by the VM. Thus, the slot found by
>      a message lookup is not affected by the privacy declarations. The
>      declarations are still used for documentation. At some point, we
>      have plans to support privacy via slot renaming with support from
>      the programming environment.

Ohhhh... NO!!! I think one of the major advantages of Self compared with
Smalltalk is the possibillity to define private slots. Looking at Digitalk's
Smalltalk/V you can find a lot of methods with comment "Private", even though
you _must_ use them - what Digitalk does, too! This tells me that if privacy
declaration is just a comment, people don't "waste" their time thinking
about what really had to be set private or public. :-(

Even if public / private - declaration makes reading / debugging code
more complicate (I have seen this...) I think it is a good feature for
developers, especially for developerteams.
But if using privacy, implementors of objects have to write a good 
documentation about their public slots - so you don't need to debug the
private slots to check out what the object's public slots really do...

I'm not sure if I understand what it means "to support privacy via slot
renaming with support form the programming envvironment". Could you tell
me (and the others) more about it? Or does a paper exist about this?


>   2. All parents now have the same priority. This resulted in a vast
>      simplification of the semantics of "resend".

What happens if an object has two parents, each parent with a slot named
equaly?


Ciao,
- Bjoern (very curios... ;-) )



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