ALU capability (was Re: [E-Lang] Authority -- what is its dual?)

[Dean Tribble]

At 09:40 AM 10/18/01 -0400, Jonathan A Rees wrote:

>...
>cons cells) are un-invokable.  Part of what's meant by the oo mantra
>    "everything is an object" is that everything is invokable, and (ideally)
>    that the semantics of anything is only the semantics of invoking it.  A
>    thing has no properties other than the behavior elicited by 
> invocation.  (To
>    my knowledge, only some Actors language and Joule achieve this ideal.
>    Smalltalk and E do not.)

Just for clarification, Smalltalk does take the "everything is an object" 
perspective, even if it does not completely follow through on it.  This is 
unlike C++ or Java, which have non-object scalars that are nothing like 
objects.  E mostly takes the EiaO perspective, doesn't it?

>Regarding the mantra: In a pure message-passing environment, where
>sending a message doesn't imply that you're lending resources to the
>thing that receives it, "everything is an object" may actually work.
>But as I argue in
>   http://192.168.2.1/mumble.net/jar/pubs/scheme-of-things/opaque-types.ps

(BTW your link is broken:  that should be http://mumble.net/...).

>you really need rights amplification, which is strictly NOT OO, if
>there is a potential cost to sending a message.  I suspect you need it
>for other reasons as well.  Rights amplification is theoretically
>equivalent to any feature that allows for passive objects such as
>non-actor numbers.

I don't understand this.  I am not sure what you are referring to in the 
paper.  As Joule Verifiers (and Logical Secrets, and the brand stuff in E) 
show, rights amplification can be implemented in pure-OO just fine.

>I would love to argue with you about the viability of OO dogma, by the
>way, since I have so many disagreements with it (with the dogma, not
>OO -- I like OO where it's helpful).  But I don't see any relevance to
>E, so let's do it off of the list.

I would as well (I am strongly in favor of EiaO!).  Feel free to message me!

dean