zlacker

In Alan Kay's recent talks where he describes the implementation of Squeak, one of the last things he demonstrates is the ability to query the system for:

  Number of total objects
  Size of objects
  Number of methods
  Avg size of method
  Etc

As a sibling comment points out, by definition a live system can do everything a dead system can and more.

>>infini+(OP)
All of those are dynamic properties of one running system, what if I pass in a different set of starting state to it? Will it allocate more objects then? Are any of the methods unused? Well, maybe it is now, but maybe we'll redefine a method at runtime to call the previously unused method.

> As a sibling comment points out, by definition a live system can do everything a dead system can and more.

"Can do" is not the same as "we can say about", see my response to sibling.