1.2 Terms

Slate is an object-oriented language, and as such works with some terms worth describing initially for clarity. These are primarily inspired by the metaphor of computational entities which communicate via messages, as follows:

Object

is some thing in the system that can be identified.

Method

is some behavior or procedure that is defined on some objects or class of objects.

Message

is the act of requesting a behavior or procedure from some objects, the message's arguments. The requestor is known as the sender.

Answer

is the response to a message; a value that expressions evaluate into or return to the message's sender.

Selector

is the name of a method or a message-send.

Inheritance

is a relationship between objects that confers one object's (the parent) behavior on another (the child).

Dispatch

is the process of determining, from a message-send, what method is appropriate to invoke to implement the behavior. This is also referred to as lookup.