> > Well now that we are on the subject of Kaypro...What ever happened to
Alan Kay ?
> > Is this guy still around ?
> You mean Andy Kay? Yes, he is still around.
Alan Kay is also still around and quite active in the Squeak community,
Squeak being a portable revival of Smalltalk. He's now at Disney, believe it
or not.
Which leads to the question... anyone on this list have any Xerox Stars
(running Smalltalk, of course)?
Cheers,
- Joe
----- Original Message -----
From: Alan Kay <alank_at_wdi.disney.com>
To: <squeak_at_cs.uiuc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 1999 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: How difficult is multiple inheritance?
>Folks --
>
>There is a cooler and most interesting way to approach all this. Much of
>the seminal work was done around the late 70s in PARC Smalltalk by Ira
>Goldstein and Danny Bobrow -- it was called PIE: Personal Information
>Environment -- and they have been written up as PARC Blue Books (as noted
>by Mike Klein previously to the Squeak list) ; *and* they can sometimes be
>obtained from PARC.
> The basic idea is to have an object made up of multiple perspectives
>e.g. a given object could have the perspectives of being an employer, an
>employee, a father, a son, etc., *and* the perspective of being an object.
>The internal representational strategy they used was to let a logical
>object be made of as many Smalltalk instances as were needed, especially if
>the perspectives were disjoint enough to give fits to simple-minded
>mulitple inheritance schemes.
>
>I have been a big fan of this general approach since Goldstein got it
>running. There are also a wealth of other terrific ideas in their papers.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 00:47:33 GMT