Tim Jones’ PhD thesis on Grace’s design – Classless Object Semantics is now in VUW’s research repository.

If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, it’s a surprisingly good read…

Objects have been categorised into classes that declare and implement their behaviour ever since the paradigm of object-orientation in programming languages was first conceived. …

This dissertation investigates the foundational nature of the class in the object-oriented paradigm from the perspective of an ‘objects-first’, classless language. Using the design of theoretical models and practical implementations of these designs as extensions of the Grace programming language, we demonstrate how objects can be used to emulate the functionality of classes, and the necessary trade-offs of this approach.