Re: cloning/invocation

I am going to heavily edit this so it doesn't become another #removeAll: 
thread (where, btw, I agree with Richard)

On Thursday 29 August 2002 18:52, Marcel Weiher wrote:
> > I hope that the C example will make what I am trying to say
> > clearer.
>
> Yes, it did.  It made it clear that you are (a) using a somewhat
> creative point of view wrt 'copying' and (b) still wrong, even if I
> accepted that POV (which I don't).

Sorry about that - I wrote another message ("c correction") explaining 
that I was wrong and you were right about C. I guess I have been 
jumping back and forth between to many different languages lately :-)

> I am saying that I want something like (1) to be usable with objects
> as well as methods.

Yes, that is what am interested in knowing more about. If I have a class 
with "a" and "b" parameters, and "c" and "d" regular instance 
variables, what should the values of "c" and "d" be for a new instance? 
The Smalltalk way would be for them to be initialized to nil, I 
suppose. Since the new object creation looks like a message send, can I 
think of it as a contructor (in the C++ sense) with code that can set 
"c" and "d" in the new instance?

> Well, I have a bit of a problem with a "unifying mechanism" that is
> used neither (a) by the user nor (b) by the implementation.  If there
> is no actual leverage, maybe the mechanism isn't actually useful?

It is used by the user when dealing with the debugger.

> I was just following up on Alan's comments about "Exemplars".  Not
> sure what he has in mind there, but it does sound similar in some
> respects.

I would guess he was talking about this paper:

W.R. LaLonde, D. Thomas, and J.R. Pugh.
"An Exemplar Based Smalltalk".
In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Object-Oriented Programming 
Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '86), Portland, Oregon, ACM 
Sigplan Notices (21)11 , pp. 322--330, 1986.

I haven't read this paper since 1987, so while I can't remember any 
significant difference between this and Mario's Smalltalk-in-Self that 
doesn't mean that there weren't any.

-- Jecel