3 ms·

Hi Alan, Can you confirm that a message is a declarative information sent to a recipient which can (or can not) react to it? And what is your opinion about inh

by arloc 10y ago

Hi Alan, Can you confirm that a message is a declarative information sent to a recipient which can (or can not) react to it? And what is your opinion about inheritance in OOP? Is it absolutely essential feature in an OOP language?

alankay1 10y ago
I like "messages" as "non-command" things. And I left out inheritance in the first Smalltalk because I didn't think Simula's version was semantic enough (and still don't). The idea of a "generalization" from which you can get instances is good. Now the question -- then and now -- is how can you define the "generalization". We didn't do it well back then, and I don't know of a system that does this well enough today.