Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!think.com!samsung!uunet!odi!dlw From: dlw@odi.com (Dan Weinreb) Newsgroups: comp.object Subject: Re: "Wrappers" and "Container Objects" Message-ID: <1991Jun27.223059.12754@odi.com> Date: 27 Jun 91 22:30:59 GMT References: Reply-To: dlw@odi.com Organization: Object Design, Inc. Lines: 21 In-Reply-To: eberard@com's message of Mon, 24 Jun 91 19:28:38 EDT In article eberard@com (Edward V. Berard) writes: 3. Are there any related terms I should know about (e.g., I have heard people use the term "whopper"), and are there any citable references for these terms. I'm afraid I have to plead guilty here. Flavors, for those who don't know, was an object-oriented extension to Lisp; it was one of the predecessors of CLOS. At one point the Flavors implementation acquired a feature called "wrappers", which doesn't actually have anything to do with "wrapper classes"; they were actually "wrapper methods". We later invented a modified form of wrappers that did mostly the same thing but not quite, and we introduced them to Flavors so that people could experiment with them. We needed a name, and couldn't think of any way to characterize the differences between them and "wrappers" that was brief enough to fit into a short name. So I made up the name "whoppers". To my everlasting regret, since it is, obviously, a pretty silly name. That's all there is to it. (Unless someone else made the same mistake as I and introduced the same term for some other purpose, heaven forbid.)