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Core Behaviors

Slate defines several subtle variations on the core behavior of objects:

Root
The "root" object, upon which all the very basic methods of slot manipulation are defined.
Oddball
The branch of Root representing non-cloneable objects. These include built-in 'constants' such as the Booleans, as well as literals (value-objects) such as Characters and Symbols. Note that Oddball itself defines a clone method, but that method will only work once, in that you can clone Oddball but not objects made by cloning Oddball.
Nil
Nil is an Oddball representing "no-object".
Derivable
Derivable objects respond to derive and deriveWith:, which means they can be readily extended.
Cloneable
Cloneable objects are derivables that can be cloned.
Method
A Cloneable object with attributes for supporting execution of blocks and holding compiled code and its attributes.



Subsections

Brian Rice 2004-08-24