[Grace-core] Dialect Design Proposal

[James Noble]

> If you know another class-based language that gives a different answer, please let me know.  I can think of NO justification for the other answer.  If you are overriding a method, surely you expect all calls on the object -- including those doing initialization, to use the new value.

I agree JVM languages don't do this. 

> I can imagine a language which decides not to allow self-calls until the object is fully constructed, but that really ties your hand behind your back.

well controlling initialization is a topic of current research - Yossi Gil's "Hardhat" proposal was taken up by X10;
Alex Summers & Peter Müller had a design at last year's OOPSLA.

The problem with very restrictive languages is that people end up initialization "post construction" -
we already see this in the JVM, a student here just finished some empirical analysis showing this

J