In object-oriented programming, a programming language is said to have first-class messages or dynamic messages if in a

method call A method in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a procedure associated with a message and an object. An object consists of ''state data'' and ''behavior''; these compose an ''interface'', which specifies how the object may be utilized by any of ...

not only the receiving object and parameter list can be varied dynamically (i.e. bound to a variable or computed as an expression) but also the specific method invoked. Typed object-oriented programming languages, such as Java and C++, often do not support first-class methods.

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

only support them in an untyped way. In Objective-C ( Cocoa), you can use to represent first-class messages in a way that is aware of the types at runtime; however, safe use still relies on the programmer. Some theoretical progress has been made to support first-class messages in a type-safe manner, but none of the proposed systems has been implemented in a programming language, possibly due to their complexity.Shroff & Smith

Notes

References

* Susumu Nishimura (1998).
Static Typing for Dynamic Messages
. ''POPL '98''. * Michelle Bugliesi & Silvia Crafa (1999). "Object Calculi for Dynamic Messages". ''FOOL 6''. * Martin Müller & Susumu Nishimura (2000).
Type Inference for First-Class Messages with Feature Constraints
. ''International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science'' 11:1. * François Pottier (2000).
A versatile Constraint-based Type Inference System
. ''Nordic Journal of Computing''. * Paritosh Shroff & Scott F. Smith.
Type Inference for First-Class Messages with Match-Functions
. Object-oriented programming Subroutines {{comp-sci-stub

See also

Notes

References