There is a good article talking about 'Classes versus Prototypes' by Antero Taivalsaari in JOOP Nov/Dec 97 Vol 10, No7. It is a good introductory article that also cover the historical and philosophical background of class based and prototype based approach. I would recommend beginner to read it. -- Mark Wai Frontier Systems Architecture Inc. mailto: mwai@ibm.net or:[ mwai@frontiersa.com] __
There is a good article talking about 'Classes versus Prototypes' by Antero Taivalsaari in JOOP Nov/Dec 97 Vol 10, No7. It is a good introductory article that also cover the historical and philosophical background of class based and prototype based approach. I would recommend beginner to read it.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I haven't read that article but I think highly of Antero. He did an excellent dissertation on prototype-based languages and designed and implemented a prototype-based Forth derivative called Kevo.
One of the most complete explorations of prototype-based programming was the Self project, which ran for nearly ten years, first at Stanford and then at Sun Laboratories. An early paper, "Self: The Power of Simplicity" appeared at OOPSLA '87 and later papers described how to build large programming systems using prototypes. See, for example:
David Ungar, Randall B. Smith: Self: The Power of Simplicity. OOPSLA 1987: 227-242
Craig Chambers, David Ungar, Elgin Lee: An Efficient Implementation of SELF- a Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Language Based on Prototypes. OOPSLA 1989: 49-70
Randall B. Smith, Mark Lentczner, Walter R. Smith, Antero Taivalsaari, David Ungar: Prototype-Based Languages: Object Lessons from Class-Free Programming (Panel). OOPSLA 1994: 102-112
Randall B. Smith, John Maloney, David Ungar: The Self-4.0 User Interface: Manifesting a System-wide Vision of Concreteness, Uniformity and Flexibility. OOPSLA 1995: 47-60
You can check http://self.sunlabs.com/ but I wasn't able to access it just now so it may have been taken down. Postscript versions of many of the Self papers can be found there.
-- John
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