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Information Hiding

Another area that needs to be explored is information hiding. Dreams currently provides no mechanism for information hiding, as is present in most other object oriented programming systems. The Forth word-list (vocabulary) capability provides control of the Forth name space. If a defining word for a dream somehow created a corresponding word-list associated with that dream, then words private to that dream could be put into its word-list, and publicly visible words could be put into the application's word-list. We suspect that good use of this facility in a higher level set of defining words for dreams would be able to provide the information hiding features that are currently lacking from Dreams.



Robert J. Brown
1999-09-26