2014-03-25 10:50 GMT+00:00 Panu Suominen <panu.suominen@iki.fi>:

What do you mean operates at higher level?

It�s probably a slightly poor choice of words :)

What I mean by operating at a higher level is that, whereas:

thisContext instVarNamed: #receiver put: 42

is a single message send to an object, this:

Field a = sun.misc.VM.class.getDeclaredField("directMemory");
a.setAccessible(true);

a.get(null);

somehow makes me think about accessing internals that I shouldn�t care about. I�m not sure of what the Java code does, as far as I can tell the intention was to show me how you can access 'this' in Java. It doesn�t look very object-oriented to me, but I can�t produce a "formal" explanation of why.

Most things are much harder to do in Java than in Smalltalk but I don't know if the level differs so much. For example method substitution is not so standard VM feature in Java.

Maybe it wasn�t the right choice of words. I accept suggestions of alternatives :)

Cheers,

Sergi