Generalized Message Passing in a Virtual Reality Application
DAVID W. FLATER · 1997
The message passing semantics of an object-oriented programming language is one of the factors that determines how powerful the language is. Whether it is referred to as a "method invocation," a "dispatching call," an "event," a "signal," or something else, each object-oriented programming language supports some operation that is similar in effect to "message passing." What differs from language to language is the semantics of that message passing. These semantics largely determine the degree to which an object-oriented language supports polymorphism, overloading, type checking, and abstraction. Although it is theoretically possible to implement any given application in any computationally complete language, the flexibility of the language that is used will, in practice, have a great influence over the shape of the final product. Those features that are extremely difficult to implement in the language being used are less likely to be implemented. If the project is one where ...