A question about Self

Hi


There doesn't seem to be a newsgroup for the Self language, so these
newsgroups seems to be the most promising. Last night I re-read the Self
papers from the Stanford archive, and was a little puzzled by something,
namely does Self actually do dynamic code generation, that is code
generation while a program is running?. I ask this question because it
appears to me that :-


a) several of their techniques are/could be static compile time
optimisations. The most notable is type prediction which could be done at
compile time. Maybe it is?


b) for several techniques it was not clear whether they were run time or
compile time. For example iterative type analysis can be seen as a form of
compile time type inference, or it could be done at run-time...


c) several techniques appeared to be out and out dynamic code generation
techniques. Customised compilation for example would seem to be such a
technique since to generate a different method body for each combination
of argument types implies doing it at run-time (can't do it at compile
time since don't know all the possible types then, or do you ...?)


So I am a little confused. Does Self do dynamic code generation at all, or
are all their optimisation techniques static? If the answer to this
question is "no" would anyone know any languages which do do dynamic code
generation?


Thanks


graham
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