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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
- some thing in the system that can be identified.
- Method
- some behavior or procedure that is defined on some objects
or class of objects.
- Message
- the act of requesting a behavior or procedure from some
objects, the message's arguments.
- Answer
- the response to a message; a value that expressions evaluate
into.
- Selector
- the name of a method or a message-send.
- Inheritance
- a relationship between objects that confers one object's
(the parent) behavior on another (the child).
- Dispatch
- the process of determining, from a message-send, what method
is appropriate to invoke to implement the behavior.
The Slate Project
2004-08-06