From: Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@...>
Date: 2005-04-24T01:13:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Truth, Void, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ruby (was: Re: Ilias is Crazy -- a plea)

Peter Suk <peter.kwangjun.suk@mac.com> writes:

> On Apr 23, 2005, at 9:24 AM, Christian Neukirchen wrote:
>>  And: You can set the
>> superclass to be nil, but that makes certain methods not look at the
>> superclass, not look at nil.
>
> That's really an implementation detail -- people doing conditional
> logic where polymorphism would also do.  I just inspected
> UndefinedObject in Squeak 3.7 and used the inspector window to set its
> superclass to Class.  Now we can reimplement methods like
> allSuperclasses so that they are polymorphic.  (Well, you have to
> change a bunch of other assumptions in the system too.  Browsers will
> now throw exceptions on certain operations.  But things still *kinda*
> work. :)

Ok, you are right.

> I know there is a doesNotUndertand equivalent, so Ruby has forwarding
> proxies.  Is there an equivalent of become: ?

Not yet, but I'd love that.

> --Peter
-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org