Marcus Denker - Variables in Pharo

We like to say that “Everything is an Object” in Smalltalk. This is true in many cases: Classes, methods, even the execution stack are reflectively available as objects.
This talk shows how this idea can be extended to Variables and how Pharo implements first-class Variables for Globals, instance Variables, Class Variables, and even temporary variables.

This presentation explores the Variable hierarchy, shows how variables simplify the compiler and how the reflective API provided by variables is used by the debugger.
In a hands-on tutorial, we extend the language by defining new kinds of Variables.

Marcus Denker is a permanent researcher at INRIA Lille - Nord Europe. Before, he was a postdoc at the PLEIAD lab/DCC University of Chile and the Software Composition Group, University of Bern. His research focuses on reflection and meta-programming for dynamic languages. Marcus Denker received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bern/Switzerland in 2008 and a Dipl.-Inform. (MSc) from the University of Karlsruhe/Germany in 2004. He co-founded Zweidenker GmbH in 2009.