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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
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