Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation
Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation
Using prototypical objects to implement shared behavior in object-oriented systems
OOPLSA '86 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
OOPSLA '87 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
An efficient implementation of SELF a dynamically-typed object-oriented language based on prototypes
OOPSLA '89 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
The art of metaobject protocol
The art of metaobject protocol
Efficient implementation of the smalltalk-80 system
POPL '84 Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages
Constructing a metacircular Virtual machine in an exploratory programming environment
OOPSLA '05 Companion to the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual
Open Implementations and Metaobject Protocols
Open Implementations and Metaobject Protocols
Applying lightweight flexible virtual machines to extensible embedded systems
Proceedings of the 1st workshop on Isolation and integration in embedded systems
Optimizing dynamic dispatch with fine-grained state tracking
Proceedings of the 6th symposium on Dynamic languages
Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development IX
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Programming languages often hide their implementation at a level of abstraction that is inaccessible to programmers. Decisions and tradeoffs made by the language designer at this level (single vs. multiple inheritance, mixins vs. Traits, dynamic dispatch vs. static case analysis, etc.) cannot be repaired easily by the programmer when they prove inconvenient or inadequate. The artificial distinction between implementation language and end-user language can be eliminated by implementing the language using only end-user objects and messages, making the implementation accessible for arbitrary modification by programmers. We show that three object types and five methods are sufficient to bootstrap an extensible object model and messaging semantics that are described entirely in terms of those same objects and messages. Raising the implementation to the programmers' level lets them design and control their own implementation mechanisms in which to express concise solutions and frees the original language designer from ever having to say "I'm sorry".