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From: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: ... and zen there were objects.
Message-ID: <1532.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 16 Aug 90 04:57:04 GMT
References: <90227.092721DN5@psuvm.psu.edu>
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 39

In <90227.092721DN5@psuvm.psu.edu>, DN5@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
> In article <1498.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>, dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us (Doug
> >        10 20 MoveTo MyRectangle SEND
> >
> >the nice thing about having an explicit send is that you can replace
> >MoveTo and/or MyRectangle with arbitrary Forth code and still have it
> >work.
> 
> My comments:
> 
> I don't like this syntax, because it means that I would have to
> do something special if I had a function which returned an object
> (i.e., I had an anonymous object on the top of the stack).

Now I'm really confused.  When I said 'you can replace MyRectangle with
arbitrary Forth code' that is precisely what I meant (anonymous objects).
I think we agree here despite what we are saying.  ;-)

> (i.e., I had an anonymous object on the top of the stack).  The
> syntax which I came up with when I was experimenting with objects
> in forth is similar:
> 
>     10 20 MyRectangle ~ MoveTo
> 
> Basically ~ was an immediate word which took the next word as a
> string, and hashed it to a method reference, and compiled a call
> to the object dereferencer with that as a parameter.  In the future
> I would replace all calls which could be figured out at compile
> time to a direct call to word involved.

Whether the message name itself is IMMEDIATE or whether there is a special
prefix which is IMMEDIATE, message names are still active and I still object
to them.

-Doug

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