[Python-ideas] Message passing syntax for objects

[Ian Cordasco]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 11:53 PM, Mark Janssen
<dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I just posted an answers on quora.com about OOP (http://qr.ae/TM1Vb)
> and wanted to engage the python community on the subject.
>
> Alan Kay's idea of message-passing in Smalltalk are interesting, and
> like the questioner says, never took off.  My answer was that Alan
> Kay's abstraction of "Everything is an object" fails because you can't
> have message-passing, an I/O task, working in the same space as your
> objects -- they are two very different functionalities and they have
> to be preserved **for the programmer**.
>
> This functional separation made me think that Python could benefit
> from a syntactical, language-given separation between Classes and the
> messages between them, to encourage loosely-coupled, modular OOP.
> Something that OOP has always promised but never delivered.
>
> I think we should co-opt C++'s poorly used >> and << I/O operators
> (for files) and re-purpose them for objects/classes.  One could then
> have within interpreter space, the ability to pass in a message to an
> object.
>
>>>>  42 >> MyObject  #sends 42 as a message into MyObject
>
> The Object definition would then have special methods __in__ to
> receive data and a special way of outputing data that can be caught
> __str__(?).
>
> I'm hoping the community can comment on the matter....
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark

What then happens to the binary shift operators: >> and <<? Those are
defined by __rshift__ and __lshift__ (respectively) on an object
already (help(int)). You could co-opt those operators with those
methods on your object but that would probably confuse plenty of
people. It's an interesting idea otherwise.