9/4/2002
www.smallscript.org
Copyright 2002 © SmallScript Corp, LLC
13
The roles of classes
•Unit of Behavior
–Inheritance of Implementation
•SI via a single Superclass
•MI through Aspects
[Interfaces and Mixins]
–Methods for The Class
•A Function
–Methods for Instances
•A Member Function
•Unit of Metadata
–Mutable Repository
–Arbitrarily extensible
–Reflectively queryable
•Unit of Structure
–Constructor of Objects
–Single Inheritance of Layout of Fields
•Reference Types (Slots)
•Value Types (Bits/Structs)
–Intrinsic Aggregation and MI Composition through Interfaces
•Unit of Privilege/Scope
–Namespace
•Container of shared fields (variables)
•Scope for Message Selectors
–Inheritance of Scope
•SI via a single Superscope
•MI through Importing
–
Architecture and Features