Introduction:

	Every language under the sun these days is Object Oriented.  In an
	effort to make POSIX shell more buzzword compliant, and to show
	that it's really not a big deal for a language to lack built-in OO
	support, we have added object orientation to plain old shell
	script.  Specifically, we have implemented classless OO with intro-
	spection, finalization, serialization, and multiple inheritance.
	Even then, most of these buzzword features are add-on modules.

	Shoop scripts look similiar to some OO languages, but there are
	various differences.  Most of these differences stem from the fact
	that the shell is the limiting factor.


Statements:

	A valid shoop statement has the following form: 

		<obj> . <name> [ \.?[=:]q?p?) (<value>|<code>)]

	Each item as the following definitions:

	obj:

		The name of the object.

	variable:

		A non-typed variable.  This, in grand shell fashion, stores
		its data as a string.

	name:

		The name of the method or variable in which to access.

	value:

		The text string that should be assigned to the variable or
		method.


Assignments:

	When the character immediately following the method/variable is
	'=' or ':', an assignment takes place.  If the character is '=',
	the name refers to a variable, and the value is treated as a text
	string.  If the character is ':', then the name is a method.

	There are 3 assignment modifiers that can be used.  If the above
        character is preceeded with '.', then this means to append the new
	value to the current value.  A 'q' on the end means to not echo
	the results of the assignment('q' only makes sense when assigning
	to a variable).  If the 'p' modifier is used, then the method/
	variable is invisible to introspection.  All the distributed
	modules use :p.

Methods:

	Methods are short shell snippets, that process arguments, and
	optionally return data.  
	
code:

	The program code that should be run.  The shell variable $THIS
	will contain the name of the current object, and the positional
	parameters("$@", $*, etc) will contain the method arguments.

method:

	A function or subroutine that optionally takes a list of argu-
	ments.

See also:

	modules.txt