Section 2

Fundamental
Objects

About This Section

This section discusses the various standard objects in the system.  These are common objects that you will use often in your programs.  Within each chapter, the fundamentals of how the object works is discussed, followed by messages with examples.  You may choose to jump around the section, reading only the fundamentals, and leave the message details for later.  Or you can read each chapter in  full as you need those objects.

The objects discussed in this section are:
Numbers
Numbers represent quantities.  They can be integers or floating point values.  They understand arithmetic and comparison operations.  There are two kinds of numbers: standard and extended precision.

Strings
Strings are collections of characters.  They can be combined and divided up.

Groups
Groups are collections of objects: such as a set, or a sequence.  Groups are a powerful way of handling multiple objects.

Misc. Objects
This chapter discusses the objects transcript, user, folder and time.

Special Objects
This chapter discusses the objects ???, nil, false, true.

Object
The messages that object understand are inherited by all objects.  There are several common messages and messages for object introspection.