objects and messages

[RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2]

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Sorry, folks, about my recent gap in input to the group.  The ship's 
LAN went off again.  It completely succumbed to virus-infestation. 
 (i.e. it doesn't work.)

Let me clarify a stance on extensional programming: it sucks! I don't 
want to see it advocated again.  The primary feature of any 
programming system that I have been advocating is intensionality.

How many of you actually want to remember what this or that thing is 
called in order to refer to it?  One of the distinct flaws with trying 
to introduce end-users to programming seems to be forcing them to 
think solely in extensional terms.  It's not intuitive, it only 
encourages bug-propagation, necessitates complication in program 
structure, and (I argue) is completely unnecessary!

I could also argue this from the standpoint of the Tunes goals 
(ideals).  I can take as an extension of the idea of abstraction that 
any idea which can be abstracted from low-level code should be 
abstracted.  When dealing with any type-system (of which Tunes 
obviously is an example), what user wants to spend time thinking about 
type-representation?  It seems to be useless, to me, to have multiple 
representations of the same object which are only trivially apparent 
as equals to the user, while the computer duplicates its efforts to 
deal with both types.
It seems to me that lambda-calculus, by carrying in its implicit 
structure standard extensional (reference-based) logic and 
substitution rules, has no place in Tunes except as a toy for hackers 
and mathematicians interested in the limitations of such a design.


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