Oren Tirosh
Two references to the same object may have very different expectations about what they are pointing to.
It sounds a bit odd to talk about references having expectations. I think all Oren is trying to say is that different pieces of code may have different requirements of the same object, or the same piece of code at different times, and that it's not practical to precalculate all the requirements that might exist and put information about them in the object itself or its class, or anywhere else for that matter. So he wants to check the requirements procedurally whenever such a check is needed. Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+