Hi Ryan
Check out Smalltalk-71, which was a design to do just what you suggest -- it
was basically an attempt to combine some of my favorite languages of the time
-- Logo and Lisp, Carl Hewitt's Planner, Lisp 70, etc.
This never got implemented because of "a bet" that turned into Smalltalk-72,
which also did what you suggest, but in a less comprehensive way -- think of
each object as a Lisp closure that could be sent a pointer to the message and
could then parse-and-eval that.
A key to scaling -- that we didn't try to do -- is "semantic typing" (which I
think is discussed in some of the STEPS material) -- that is: to be able to
characterize the meaning of what is needed and produced in terms of a
description rather than a label. Looks like we won't get to that idea this time
either.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Ryan Mitchley <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 12:57 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA
>
>
>
>On 27/02/2012 19:48, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
>
>
>>My interest in it came out of thinking about integrating
pub/sub (multi- and broadcast) messaging into the heart of a
language. What would a Smalltalk look like if, instead of a
strict unicast model with multi- and broadcast constructed
atop (via Observer/Observable), it had a messaging model
capable of natively expressing unicast, anycast, multicast,
and broadcast patterns?
>>
>I've wondered if pattern matching shouldn't be a foundation of
method resolution (akin to binding with backtracking in Prolog) - if
a multicast message matches, the "method" is invoked (with much less
specificity than traditional method resolution by name/token). This
is maybe closer to the biological model of a cell surface receptor.
>
>Of course, complexity is an issue with this approach (potentially
NP-complete).
>
>Maybe this has been done and I've missed it.
>
>
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