On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:09:05 -0600, "Marcus G. Daniels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Prof David West wrote: > > As an unmitigated object bigot I would claim that there is nothing in > > agents (or aspects for that matter) that did not exist in objects as > > objects were supposed to be. > Ideally, agents ought to have the ability to function as individuals > without coordination through schedulers, top down event loops, etc., the > ability to change their functioning over time (change their set of > active methods or implementations of them), and the ability to move > around and adapt to an environment. Seems to me multithreaded CLOS has > all this, but not all of that is thanks to objects. > > So how were objects supposed to be?
Fully autonomous, intelligent, virtual computers. Intelligence included meta-intelligence (reflection). Of course this was a metaphor and and all implementations (including Smalltalk and Self) fell somewhat short in the early years. When ParcPlace finally realized that Java was a threat and not just a toy they released their lab technology that made the metaphor 95% realizable, but people had already stopped listening. An object should function as an individual (classes, class hierarchies were a kludge to facilitate semi-efficient implementation), should contain within itself the ability to work with other objects to obtain resources (memory, bus, cpu), handle its own message queuing, add/delete functions and knowledge at run-time, move, and adapt. A Smalltalk expression should be a first class object, hence be modifiable at run-time (through the actions of itself or other objects) and a Smalltalk program should be nothing more than a first class ordered collection - also modifiable at run-time. The only dependency to non-objectiveness is reliance on an intepreter - which can be extremely small and efficient. Objects should be able to interact with bare hardware and not rely on OS or other environments - like the Smalltalk image. I would content that all of this was possible in the nineties in Smalltalk. Not much of it has been utilized outside of the European Squeak (Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls rewritten Smalltalk) community. davew > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
