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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.
Brian Rice
2004-10-30