<story><title>Kay on the Meaning of &quot;Object-Oriented Programming&quot;</title><url>http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cconroy</author><text>What does Kay mean by late-binding? ... not the dynamic binding of overriding methods in a subclass or virtual functions (C++)? The last paragraphs compared smalltalk with lisp in this respect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>igrekel</author><text>Not being in his head, I&apos;ll try to guess from what I know of smalltalk. It means the actual binding of a message to the method to execute is done only when the message is received. TOo give you an idea, you may associate some code to specific messages to an object at runtime, you may also implement doesNotUnderstand and decide how to handle messages who don&apos;t have corresponding methods (forward it to another object, have some special behavior, create the method on the fly as needed).</text></comment>
<story><title>Kay on the Meaning of &quot;Object-Oriented Programming&quot;</title><url>http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cconroy</author><text>What does Kay mean by late-binding? ... not the dynamic binding of overriding methods in a subclass or virtual functions (C++)? The last paragraphs compared smalltalk with lisp in this respect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>Possibly the full dynamic dispatch (AKA multi-methods) that you get with systems like CLOS - where the types of all of the arguments are used to compute matching methods, not just the type of the object you are invoking the method on.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkLateBinding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmalltalkLateBinding&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>