Re: SERVER: Verbing properties

• Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 05:47:04 PST
• From:
  "Seth I. Rich" <sir@po.cwru.edu>
• Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Vijay Saraswat <saraswat@parc.xerox.com>:
>When I run my code and it accesses your property, I know that
>none of your code ran ... I know that as long as my current task
>does not suspend, and I do not invoke verbs on you, the data I
>read will remain unchanged. And that I (my task) will not be
>charged excessively because you ran a big verb on my watch when I
>just wanted the value of a variable. You just read out a value
>for me, you dont compute arbitrarily. Major win for a language
>for reactive computation.

This is IMO very very serious.  I know that, given the code segment

  temp = foo.bar;
  /* some random computation which
     I -know- does not suspend */
  foo.bar = temp;

no code AT ALL was executed besides mine.  I know that foo will continue
to exist and that it will have a bar property, and I don't need to keep
checking that the value stored there has changed.

I would argue that this is a good case for either putting property access
(property-value-setting) into a builtin (perhaps transparently), or creating
strong motivations for programmers to write to your specs.

Seth----------------------------------------------------------------------
Seth I. Rich - sir@po.cwru.edu
                                 There is nothing more precious than
Rabbits on walls, no problem.    a tear of true repentance.

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