Nothing in OOP is obvious

Is nothing in OOP obvious to the neophyte?

Here is comment from a class named Observable declared as follows :


   public abstract shared Observable


The documentation for the class contains the following method comment  :

public add-observer

Add an observer to this object's list of observers to be notified. Typically this is only called from the Observer's observe method.


For this to make sense to a neophyte, wouldn't we need TWO variants of PUBLIC, e.g.,

• MY-PUBLIC-FACE
• YOUR-PUBLIC-VIEW-OF-ME

corresponding to

• obj-public (intended for me to call against myself)
• consumers-public (available as your message sent to me)

??

BTW, that add-observer method is declared as follows :

public  
{Observable.add-observer
    o:Observer,
    error-if-present?:bool = false
}:void


Is the issue the method name ?  Should it be 

   all-ya-all-add-observer-to-me

??

Consider :

   receive-observer

But what in a name prevents a hack ?  One idea : object procedures and functions versus messages.  In such a language, an object never sends itself a message.  If you have a local copy of an object, you can use its public procedures and functions.  If you have a pointer to an object - an object reference - you send only messages.

And what did the documenting author mean by "typically" ?

---

Example is the Curl developer's example macro

This little Curl script could be the web developer's best friend.
As a web content language, Curl 5.0 provides a powerful RIA platform. This applet using the macro 'example' might convince you.
The macro 'example' creates a live code example in your browser which will open a child applet window.
First we run the following code snippet as an applet in the Curl IDE, embed it as a web applet or launch it with the Curl RTE with a dbl-click in a file explorer.

{curl 5.0 applet}
{applet license="development"}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "windows-latin-1"}
{import * from CURL.DOC.CONTENT.ACCESSORIES}
{example 
{bold Hello {italic there}! }
}

Example is a Curl macro. The result is a web page in which to execute Curl, revert and save Curl applets. It you know something slicker than this, I would want to see it.
You may notice that in my example I have thrown in a {VBox }
I could hit REVERT and I would be back at the original. Here is the result:



If I like my changes, I can save the code from the web page with 'Save Applet'.
In practical terms this also means the ability to create web-based developer documentation with 'live' code snippets. And the eample maco nests: you can have a nippet which is used to demonstrate another snippet.
Curl comes with a visual test framework, but this little 'example' macro should give you a hint of what is possible in Curl 5.0
Note that 'example' is made available by importing the Curl package

CURL.DOC.CONTENT.ACCESSORIES