On 9/7/11 3:50 PM, David Barbour wrote:
On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Casey Ransberger <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:It seems to me that there is tension here, forces pulling in orthogonal directions. In systems which include a MOP, it seems as though encapsulation is sort of hosed at will. Certainly I'm not arguing against the MOP, it's one of the most powerful ideas in programming. For some things, it seems absolutely necessary, but then... there's the abuse of the MOP. Is this tension irreconcilable? There are patterns for meta-object protocol that protect encapsulation (and security).
There was a paper (that I cannot find now) that discussed the notion that a language can/should support any number of MOPs by reifying MOPs as objects. That MOP could be a mirror factory or a collection of functors, or be implemented with a completely different style or set of capabilities. One would create an instance of a MOP by constructing it with a object instance and subsequently interact with the MOP object. MOPs could be composed, etc.
The gist of the paper: a MOP does not need to expose any implementation details at all and one MOP does not rule them all.
-- KAS _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
