I read up on the history of Smalltalk and Object Oriented Programming, and one thing I have not quite grasped is the idea of "protection."
I know you can protect methods from being accessed by making them private or protected in certain programming languages but something else must be meant here.
Do you protect objects from being changed? Do you protect them from being "talked to" / responding with valuable returns to unauthorized requests / initial-message-senders? To what purpose?
And how exactly are they being protected, by what mechanism so to speak? (particularly in Smalltalk)
I know you can protect methods from being accessed by making them private or protected in certain programming languages but something else must be meant here.
Do you protect objects from being changed? Do you protect them from being "talked to" / responding with valuable returns to unauthorized requests / initial-message-senders? To what purpose?
And how exactly are they being protected, by what mechanism so to speak? (particularly in Smalltalk)