Re: using gcj for a different language - is it possible?

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Per Bothner writes:
 > Andrew Pinski wrote:
 > 
 > >> And does Objective-C support operations like #become: (switching the
 > >> identities of two objects)?
 > > 
 > > If you mean something like -PoseAs: which changes class types at 
 > > runtime, yes.
 > > If that is not what you mean then can you help out here and explain what 
 > > really
 > > #become does?
 > 
 > 'a become: b' swaps object identity.
 > After the become all references that used to point to the
 > object references by a now point to the object that used to
 > be referenced by b.
 > 
 > This isn't really practical to support unless you use indirection
 > via an object table, which Objective-C doesn't.

I think the trick used in Smalltalk was to copy and then overwrite
both objects with a special indirection object.  We could do this in
gcj.

Andrew.