> actors Sorry, I should've been clearer there. I meant constructors. > can you give an example of how an init function is used to do something that an object

> actors Sorry, I should've been clearer there. I meant constructors. > can you give an example of how an init function is used to do something that an object should already know? The only way to instantiate a new version of an object in Pharo is with the new message to the class, for example with aDate := Date new However, that point does not yet know what its time offset from epoch is, which is absolutely vital when trying to use a date. It needs to be instantiated at construction with that information. How pharo gets around is by essentially creating class messages which hand you back the instantiated object, such as with aDate := Date year: 2015 month: 12 day: 31 However, this is just syntactic sugar (as far as I can tell, please someone correct me if I'm wrong) for a class message calling new and setting the properties on the object it just created. It is a fairly clean way to create objects, in general. However, the method 'new' can still be used (there is no access modifiers in Pharo), so it's still possible to call an object without ensuring it's initialized properly. I have yet to find a good way around this.