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parent -- parent type of an object

Synopsis

Description

Methods for the instances of X which are not found in X itself are sought in P, and its parent, and so on. Thus the mathematical notion of a set P and a subset X can modeled in this way.

Things that don't have instances have the empty class, called Nothing as their parent. The parent of Thing is Thing itself (because every thing is a thing).

The entire structure of types and their parents can be displayed with showStructure.

For the programmer

The object parent is a compiled function.