another argument against shared libraries

[Dave Forsey]

The arguments against the use of shared libraries seems to rest
on the fact that the structural rather than the functional aspect
of the library will change causing a large amount of managerial 
headaches. This problem goes away if the libraries are not affected
by the structure of the data it is handed. Absurd? Perhaps. But
reflect on the way that Smalltalk-80 works. Everything in the system
is part of a shared library. Handing a floating point number instead
of a SmallInteger to a method causes no problems because it still
behaves as a "Number".  While this can't handle everything it goes
a lot further than any other system.

This is, by the way, one of the reasons that "Object-Oriented Programming"
is different than typical procedural languages and styles.

This of course is opening up an old can of worms but......

	Dave Forsey
	Computer Graphics Laboratory
	University of Waterloo.
	Waterloo Canada