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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.


next up previous contents index
Next: 2 Language Reference Up: 1 Introduction Previous: 1.1 Conventions   Contents   Index
Brian Rice 2005-11-21