Programming with explicit metaclasses in Smalltalk-80

  • Authors:

  • J.-P. Briot;P. Cointe

  • Affiliations:

  • Equipe Mixte Rank Xerox France - LITP, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France;Equipe Mixte Rank Xerox France - LITP, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '89 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

This paper discusses the introduction of explicit metaclasses á la ObjVlisp into the Smalltalk-80 language. The rigidity of Smalltalk metaclass architecture motivated this work. We decided to implement the ObjVlisp model into the standard Smalltalk-80 system. The resulting combination defines the Classtalk platform. This platform provides a full-size environment to experiment with class-oriented programming by combining implicit metaclasses á la Smalltalk and explicit metaclasses á la ObjVlisp. Obviously, these experiments are not limited to the Smalltalk world and will be useful to understand and practice the metaclass concept advocated by modern object-oriented languages such as ObjVlisp and CLOS.