Anonymous user
Category:Smalltalk: Difference between revisions
→Class Definition
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Classes can be anonymous, in most systems, you can "Class new new" to create a new anonymous class and an instance of it (but be aware, that the class should contain enough state to properly specify their instance's layout, so usually more info is needed (number and names of instance variables, inheritance etc.). Otherwise some tools (Inspector) may fail to reflect on it.
Be reminded that classes are themself objects and therefore instances of some class; in this case a so called <I>Metaclass</I>. They follow the same inheritance and message send semantics as ordinary objects. Thus, you can define class-side methods and redefine them in subclasses. For example, you can redefine the "new" method to implement caches, singletons or any other special feature. Often multiple instance creation methods (with different parameters) are provided by a class.
The class also provides reflection protocol, eg. to retrieve all of its instances, to ask for the names of private slots, to ask for the set of supported messages etc.
=== Control Structures ===
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