🚀 go-pugleaf

>Forwarding is great and IMHO used way too little, maybe because many
>people don't know something like it exists, or how easy, yet powerful
>it is.

By forwarding, I assume you mean an object implements a message by sending
the message along to another object. If so...

I fully agree with you its extremely powerful and useful, and I use it
regularly. My big bitch about it in Smalltalk is the need to write the
same message (message name at least) in more than one object. This makes
it harder to maintain, because message modifications (I must be a bad
programmer, I change method names a lot. I also add and remove them) must
be performed in more than one location (bad OOP principle).

One option is to trap the #doesNotUnderstand: method and automate the
propogation, but this is a poor solution, really.

Another option is to send messages in a generic message with an argument,
e.g., propertyAt: or propertyAt:put:. I use this a great deal.

Another option is a pattern where you define a superclass with all the
messages defined and implemented as passing the message along. Subclasses
then override this message and handle it explicitly. This is powerful, but
makes things too "global". In the ridiculous limit, all methods ever
written are also located in the Object class.

None of these solutions is optimal. Still looking...