Enclosed is Mitch Wand's interpretation of Smyth's Law of Demeter.

David, is this what you intended?

-- Karl

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From wand@ccs.neu.edu Mon Jun  2 11:30:27 1997
From: Mitchell Wand <wand@ccs.neu.edu>
To: Karl Lieberherr <lieber@ccs.neu.edu>
Subject: Re: improved Law of Demeter

That is a very interesting correspondence, especially about the relationship to
communicating processes.  What Smyth is saying is that communication should be
what is called in the concurrency community "asynchronous":  that is, every
send should conceptually be the last action of a process.  So instead of
writing

!a.P

which means "send a, wait for the message to be received, and then continue
with P", one writes

!a || P

which means "fork a thread that sends 'a' and then dies, and immediately
continue with P".

Smyth's ideas about error handling are also interesting.  It might be
interesting to recast them into Obliq or some other primitive distributed OOPL
to see how they play out.

--Mitch