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Date:Mon Jun 9 11:21:12 2001 
Subject:Re: Closures and OOP (Was Re: filenames, argument list separators + gsl extension) 
From:Jonathan L Cunningham 
Volume-ID:1010609.01 

These posts don't seem to be showing up in my mail -- is there
a problem with the pop-forum mailing list to comp.lang.pop
gateway, or is is just that my mail is slow?

On 7 Jun 2001 13:00:57 GMT, kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com () wrote:

>Recall that each class gets its own classfile (I kid thee not), and
>classfiles have to be fetched by name, so getting a class without a name
>would be ... interesting.

Aah, yes. I can see where fetching an anonymous class could get,
as you say, interesting.

Although nowadays instead of a bunch of classfiles, it all goes into
a jar file. Which, I seem to recall, is just a .zip file really with
a .jar extension instead of .zip (I could be wrong).

In any case, this changes the problem of fetching an unknown file,
to extracting an unknown component from an unknown file. Not
much harder really.

>The translation rules are mandated by the specification, if I recall
>correctly, so such a compiler would be non-conforming. I think "cleverness"
>blends into "psychic" at this point. We need a quantum compiler.

Nah. I don't think quantum would do it. The next level up from the
Turing test is, I presume, soemthing like, can you distinguish this
software from an Arisian? Since an Arisian (obscure reference, but
you can figure out the rest from context[1]) would be able to figure
out what your obscure anonymous class was supposed to do, bugs
and all, it wouldn't actually need to fetch it at all.

Jonathan

[1]An Arisian can do what you just did, if you didn't already know
about them: interpolation and extrapolation from the context lets
it deduce things which are not immediately obvious.