Well, the paraphrase is apt, but misses my fundamental point. You raise an important behavior of complex systems that leads into the subject of "emergent properties"--a matter for beyond the scope of this discussion.
The "master" program and the program developer do not know anything about the 'message' process. That process is fully, completely hidden--encapsulated. Thus, reading the Master Program phrase that invoked another program does NOT tell the reader what will happen when the invocation is acted upon by some final recipient program. The invocation in OOP is truly indeterminate, or at lease may be so. That is what makes it hard for me to discuss this with others. At best, the reader of an OOP Master program may develop a belief about what may happen, an conjecture at best. Consider an example--the effects of inheritance can not be known by the reader of a Master Program in an OOP system based on the invoking phrase--the call is indeterminate. Some notes: Message paths can ramify, they are not restricted to single thread. The message process is where inheritance rules are implemented. Some message processing may be driven by things like: which hardware capable of acting on the message is least busy? Because the message path can ramify, I prefer to speak about the "message switch" mechanism that mediates between Master Programs and invoked programs. The term "message agent" comes into use here with a broader semantic that message switch. Regards, Richard. > From: Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Reply-To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 19:25:00 -0700 > To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Data dictionary question... > > If I may be so presumptious as to paraphrase Dr. Davis' explanation > here: When you create an object, you do not know in advance what > messages may be sent to that object or when. the object only responds > to the messages it receives. Think of an ant colony on the move. Each > ant knows how to respond when its neighbor moves to the right or the > left, but whatever intelligence there may be in an ant colony doesn't > reside in the individual ants but, rather, in how they interact as a > group. It's easier to build an ant, if you will, than it is to build > an ant colony. Similarly, individual object or classes can be much > more manageable than a single monolithic application. > > === > Gregory Woodhouse > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... .... ..... ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the 'Do More With Dual!' webinar happening July 14 at 8am PDT/11am EDT. We invite you to explore the latest in dual core and dual graphics technology at this free one hour event hosted by HP, AMD, and NVIDIA. To register visit http://www.hp.com/go/dualwebinar _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
