Thank you for the comprehensive response!
For messages sent by a particular object, I don’t think we can expect the object to know more than (a) the message data and (b) the intended message recipient. My rough expectation with this proposal was that we would encode these in the kind of the message-carrying resource, which can certainly be checked by the object-resource. Whatever dynamism we have, if a given object does not know the identifier of a potential message recipient, or how to encode a particular method, it simply cannot call the method. Now, we could devise “meta”-methods for lookup, but I think this is best treated as a separate concern – I touched upon the topic in the last section of this post. To touch upon the two specific examples of concern you cite:
- Whether a particular method is “overridden” seems to me like a concern purely of the receiving object (not the sender). Now, we might want “reasoning tools” to check that a method which we’re invoking behaves in a way which we expect, that’s definitely important, but that seems to me like a more general (and more difficult) topic. Is there a particular benefit to the sender knowing that a method has been overriden?
- I think intents can be represented in a way which avoids these problems entirely (see the same post again). If that approach doesn’t help, then perhaps I don’t understand the problem you have in mind clearly yet.
… out of time, will respond further later (or in the call)!