Adrian Kuhn has been blogging a series of Smalltalk Superpowers. What a wonderful blog topic. And a great job Adrian is doing too. He's a worthy Smalltalk Superhero.

I'm having an adventure in superpowering right now. I need, for reasons as of yet undisclosed (superheros live secret lives, ya know), to have my own subclass of UILookPolicy. UILookPolicy participates with UIBuilder objects to compile (build) user interfaces from WindowSpec objects. Much of its behavior is in UILookPolicy, but it is in fact an abstract class. It has a handful of platform specific subclasses.

The problem, is that I don't want a whole new subclass. I don't want to re-implement all of UILookPolicy. What I want is a generic subclass of whatever the default subclass is, whether it's a MacOSXLookPolicy or a WinXPLookPolicy.

But the subclass card has been played already. To get that kind of structure with normal everyday living, I'll have to make a subclass of each subclass. Or...

I can step into a booth and don my Lightweight Classes costume. Here's what it looks like

UILookPolicy>>myOwnPolicy



	| lightweightClass |

	lightweightClass := MyLookPolicy copy.

	lightweightClass superclass: self class.

	^lightweightClass new

With this costume on, I can send the message myOwnPolicy to any subclass instance of UILookPolicy (e.g. a MotiffLookPolicy instance) and end up with a new instance which implements the behavior of MyLookPolicy as if it were a subclass of that class. When in reality, it's a subclass of UILookPolicy, and by default, a sibling to the likes of WinXPLookPolicy and friends.

This allows me to derive from any standard LookPolicy object, one that overrides methods like button:into:, but otherwise, inherits all of the behavior of the original instance.