"I find it amusing that your explanation pretty much sums up thousands and thousands of words that I've said. I really am too verbose. ^^;"
You were probably more intelligible to everyone else; I seem to have been uncommonly dense :) What you're describing is indeed message passing. I think I was misled by your code snippets.
You're basically describing an s-expression syntax for smalltalk.
"You were probably more intelligible to everyone else; I seem to have been uncommonly dense :) What you're describing is indeed message passing. I think I was misled by your code snippets."
I was implementing message passing by using functions + closures, so it's definitely a weird form of it... most languages implement message passing with objects + methods. So, your confusion is understandable.
"Once I make the connection to smalltalk, wrapping these objects in the (annotate ..) layer seems redundant. Just get rid of types entirely."
So... what... just use duck typing for everything? :P Duck typing is easier, but has a greater possibility for strange bugs and conflicts. But Arc is a LFSP, so that might be a good fit for Arc.
Which, in fact, describes something almost completely identical to my message passing idea, except that it's more verbose in Scheme than in Arc. It even demonstrates prototypical inheritance.
The only difference is that they're using a separate function to represent each method... whereas in my examples, I've basically written the methods "inline" so there's only one function. However, I did demonstrate one way to give each method a separate function: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14368
