Re: Are Messages First Class Entities In Java?

[Christoph Schlumpf]

Dear Nelson,

There exists already an implemention of dynamic method pointers in java
(see http://www.panix.com/~rangerx/packages.html#sysExt) but as far as I
know it doesn't allow to pass arguments of different types and to get any
return type. For security reasons the sysExt package doesent work in
Applets (it does work in stand alone applications).

The design of the sysExt Package is quite different from the desing of the
Reflection API. It uses the classloader to dynamically create classes which
then are able to call the desired method. I suggest not considering this
package for evaluation reasons because it is rather different from the
things that will come from javasoft.

yours,
Christoph

Nelson wrote:
>Ah, my payoff for staying on the Swarm lists :-) Thanks for the nice
>summary, Christoph. Java *should* be able to do reflection better than
>ObjC. One of the joys of having an interpreter.. I'm sure the JIT
>compiler folks will find this awkward.
>
>Is something along these lines already implemented, though? I seem to
>remember someone doing lots of clever things by scanning the bytecode
>for the classes. The applet security manager will presumably prevent
>you from actually calling a method, but you might be able to do
>everything else..