zope's acquisition inheritance

[Marc Gluch]

On Tue, 03 Jul 2001 15:06:38 GMT, Wostenberg <pwos at home.com> wrote:

>This Smalltalker has been studying Zope, the Opensourced python product
>for internet deployment (see http://www.zope.org), to learn.
>
>It has an unusual model of interitance called acquisition, which blends
>class heiarchy with containment. Read
>http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/WhatIsAcquisition for introduction.
>Basically "objects automatically gather. services from their
>containers.". Everything is potentially a collector-class, and if I drop
>objects into a collection, they inherit behavior from the container.
>Weird, but somehow natural in this Web environment which organises
>content around a tree-structured containment plan.
>
>Anybody heard of acquisition outside Zope, or is it a new contribution
>to OO modelling?
>-Alan
>
>
>
I see an analogy to block-structured languages (Algol, Pascal),
where an inner block has access to variables and procedures
of enclosing blocks. Most of these languages employ lexical scoping,
but some allow dynamic scoping (runtime binding).

More abstraclty, a context augments the meaning of any given
statement.

Marc Gluch
Mindtap Inc.