4. The Self World

The default Self world is a set of useful objects, including objects that can be used in application programs (e.g., integers, strings, and collections), objects that support the programming environment (e.g., the debugger), and objects that simply are used to organize the other objects. This document describes how this world is organized, focusing primarily on those objects meant for use in Self programs. It does not discuss the objects used to implement system facilities—for example, there is no discussion of the objects used to implement the graphical user interface—nor does it discuss how to use programming support objects such as the command history object; such tools are described in The Self User’s Manual.

The reader is assumed to be acquainted with the Self language, the use of multiple inheritance, the use of traits objects and prototype objects, and the organizing principles of the Self world as discussed in [UCC91].

• 4.1. World Organization
  • 4.1.1. The Lobby
  • 4.1.2. Names and Paths
• 4.2. The Roots of Behavior
  • 4.2.1. Default Behavior
  • 4.2.2. The Root Traits: Traits Clonable and Traits Oddball
  • 4.2.3. Mixins
  • 4.2.4. The Identity Mixin
• 4.3. Blocks, Booleans, and Control Structures
  • 4.3.1. Booleans and Conditionals
  • 4.3.2. Loops
  • 4.3.3. Block Exits
  • 4.3.4. Other Block Behavior
• 4.4. Numbers and Time
  • 4.4.1. Random Numbers
  • 4.4.2. Time
• 4.5. Collections
  • 4.5.1. Indexable Collections
  • 4.5.2. Strings, Characters, and Paragraphs
  • 4.5.3. Unordered Sets and Dictionaries
  • 4.5.4. Tree-Based Sets and Dictionaries
  • 4.5.5. Lists and PriorityQueues
  • 4.5.6. Constructing and Concatenating Collections
• 4.6. Pairs
• 4.7. Mirrors
• 4.8. Messages
• 4.9. Processes and the Prompt
• 4.10. Foreign Objects
• 4.11. I/O and Unix
• 4.12. Other Objects
• 4.13. How to build the world
  • 4.13.1. From within the main Self tree
  • 4.13.2. From outside the main tree
  • 4.13.3. Finishing the build
• 4.14. How to use the low-level interrupt facilities
• 4.15. Using the textual debugger
• 4.16. Logging
  • 4.16.1. How to log
  • 4.16.2. How logging works