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From: dchapman@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Chapman)
Newsgroups: comp.object
Subject: Re: "Sender" construct in OOLs
Summary: forget it
Message-ID: <5677@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 8 Oct 89 22:40:39 GMT
References: <TIME.89Oct4131658@oxtrap.oxtrap.UUCP> <9450008@hplsla.HP.COM>
Sender: David Chapman <dchapman@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: dchapman@Portia.Stanford.EDU (David Chapman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 13

In article <9450008@hplsla.HP.COM> jima@hplsla.HP.COM (Jim Adcock) writes:
>You should be able to do this using function call overloading in C++.
>I suspect its not trivial to figure out, however.

After thinking about this some more, I cannot conceive of a way to
implement the "sender" construct.  Why?  Because the "sender" is of 
arbitrary type.  *Anything* can send an object a message.  That's the 
whole point.  Maybe Smalltalk or Flavors could handle this by looking 
up the type of the object, but it would be horrendous to do in a 
compiled language like C++.

Comments?  Remember, the original poster wanted mutual recursion - he
wanted to send messages back to the caller.