Smalltalk glasses

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Published Monday, April 26, 2004 6:26 PM by RoyOsherove
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Monday, April 26, 2004 3:52 PM by James Robertson

# Smalltalk glasses

<p>Roy<br/> I added a comment on my blog that points to what I've done. In terms of how a plugin is loaded - it's a parcel (VisualWorks Smalltalk-speak). A parcel is kind of like a Java JAR file, except that:</p> * The code can be for arbitrary classes * The code can change arbitrary methods in any object in the system <p>As to reflection - well, Smalltalk (and Lisp, of course) pretty much invented reflection. The capabilities go well beyond what's possible in C# or Java (or any CLR/JVM based language, for that matter). A good example of what's possible is to consider what you can accomplish with #doesNotUnderstand:</p> <p>In Smalltalk, a message that is not understood ends up generating a MessageNotUnderstood exception. However, any object can implement a #doesNotUnderstand: method, and then handle that situation locally. It's not something you do every day - but it does make proxies trivial to implement. We don't need a vendor framework for proxy operations; they are effectively free....</p>
Monday, April 26, 2004 4:14 PM by Isaac Gouy

# re: Smalltalk glasses

Smalltalk: a Reflective Language '96
http://www2.parc.com/csl/groups/sda/projects/reflection96/docs/rivard/rivard.html


(Method Wrappers rather than #doesNotUnderstand
ftp://www.laputan.org/pub/foote/brant.pdf
)
Thursday, April 29, 2004 5:38 PM by Roy Osherove

# re: Smalltalk glasses

Thanks for the input!