OOPSLA accommodation, Object Editing

[James Noble <kjx@socs.uts.EDU.AU>]

Dear Self-interest

I'm finally making the long trek to OOPSLA this year, and would be
interested in sharing accommodation, preferable with someone else who's
self-interested. If you're interested, please reply by email to

        kjx@socs.uts.edu.au

ObSelf:

I think the two recent threads on this list (the question of editing
objects in the UI, and the question of the language's model of slots)
are quite tightly related.  For example, in the bare-bones Self
language (the old command line), you can't incrementally change
objects slots: you can add or remove slots from objects, or create
objects. To change an object must be done in two stages: first create
another temporary object containing the new slot values, then do an
_AddSlots: The way I think about this when I'm working incrementally
is that I create some "naked slots" and the clip them into the object
I want to change.

This model could be carried through to the environment. To edit an
object, you extract the slots you want to change, edit those slots,
then put them back into the object. In practice, this would be similar
to the extended UI1 editor Bay described, except this provides a
better rationale.  As Bay suggests, I think this would preserves
"factuality" (sic).  Whether this will feel less direct than editing
an object, I don't know: so far, this is the way I've tended to think
about the details of doing the edits.

James Noble

-- 
James Noble, Centre for Object Technology, Applications and Research
School of Computing Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney.
kjx@socs.uts.edu.au