langreiter.com plain, simple: Self

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Self

CREATED BY Markus Fritsche • LAST EDITED BY chris 7554 days AGO

"SELF is a dynamically-typed object-oriented language. Like Smalltalk, SELF has no type declarations. Also like Smalltalk, SELF provides blocks (lexically-scoped function objects related to closures) as a basic construct. Standard control structures for iteration and Boolean selection, as well as programmer-defined control structures, are constructed out of these blocks. However, unlike Smalltalk and many other object-oriented languages, SELF has no classes. Instead it is based on the use of prototypes. In this approach, new objects are created by cloning (shallow-copying) existing objects (the prototypes). The state of the new objects can then be set to instance-specific values. Each object conceptually defines its own object-specific behavior, and may borrow behavior from other objects (called parents) using delegation (instance-level inheritance). Also unlike Smalltalk, a SELF object accesses its state entirely by sending messages rather than using special syntax for accessing a variable or changing its value. This results in many messages sent to "self", hence the name of the language."