[Grace-core] Modules & Inheritance

[James Noble]

> It's so nice to hear people talking about good code, about Self idioms!

well I like it! :-) 

> 1. Won't it eventually be desirable for the dialect declaration to do
> something other than add more symbols?

short answer: not at this stage - 
it should be possible, but we don't intent to contort the basic model 
to support e.g. lazy evaluation. 

> 2. Stylish source code will never change the dialect at a fine-grained
> level. That is, it would make code an unreadable puzzler, especially
> for students, if it included three different dialects in the span of
> twenty lines of code.

Hmm, probably. I have some odd ideas about dialect - e.g. you could
imagine a dialect for writing FSMs, another dialect for writing test cases,
and those could be commingled.  But again, that's an advanced use,
and shouldn't contort the basic model.

> If those ring true, then a promising approach is to make the dialect
> designator specific to a "compilation unit", which in typical Grace
> implementations would be a file.

Yep. I think that's something we do agree on! 

> Equally good would be to associate the dialect with some larger unit
> of code than a compilation unit, but is there one?

not as far as we've got, no.

James