Alan,
It's delightful to read your comments on Object Models and MOPs -- always interesting topics to me, and especially useful now as I'm trying to do some work in this area, with Squeak as the testbed. One of the regrets of my 4+ years at Apple, much of it working on dynamic languages (e.g., SK8) and even located just down the hall from your team, was that I didn't get to interact more with you and them. Now, through the marvels of this mailing list and the active participation of the whole Squeak team, we're all getting the benefit of that interaction. Keep the postings (and the "blue plane" changes to Squeak) coming!
Now a couple questions and an emotional reaction:
Gregor apparently published another book on MOPs by himself after "Art of the Metaobject Protocol", at MIT Press, titled "Open Implementations and Metaobject Protocols", in both hardcover (Sept 94, ISBN: 0-262-11192-6) and paperback (June 95, ISBN: 0-262-61103-1). But my attempts to get a copy at all the usual places (MIT Press, Amazon, Stacey's in Palo Alto, and even the Stanford Bookstore) have failed. How different is this book from the "AotMP" (which I have)? Should I persist in trying to get a copy?
Gregor seems to be pursuing a new topic, "aspect oriented programming". Any comments on this line of research? A quick read of the intro web pages didn't leave me with enough concrete understanding to assess the ideas.
You said: ....But it is really terrible if you just ban such things. That is too moralistic and smacks of the Wirth school of (non)programming. This is why well thought out metasystems should allow the good designer/programmer to have their cake and eat it too. The "Metaobject protocol" by Greg and Danny, et. al., at PARC is an inspiring further advance in what we had done there in the '70s, and it gives some tantalizing insights into what could yet be invented.... Ouch! How can I clear my name? :-) Maybe I'll just have to convince you that Nicklaus is the "call-by-name" Wirth and I'm the "call-by-value" Wirth :-)
Mike Wirth IBM Almaden Research Center