[mmiller]

I was using "data" in the spirit of a saying I heard many years ago in CS, that, "Data is code, and code is data." It seems that people in CS are still familiar with this phrase. I was focusing on the latter part of that phrase. I was trying to answer the question that I think is often implied once you start talking to people about real OOP, "What about data?" I almost don't like the term "data" when talking about this, because as you say, it gets one away from the focus on semantics, but whenever you're talking to people in the computing field, such as it is, I think this question is unavoidable, because people are used to thinking of code and information as separate, hence the notion of data structures. People need a way to translate in their minds between what they've done with information before, and what it can be. So, I used the term "data" to talk about "literal objects" (like "2", or other kinds of input), but I was using the description of "processors" (ie. computers), "containing procedures," which can also be thought of as "operators."

I think the idea of an "inversion" is quite apt, because as you've said before, the idea of data structures is that you have procedures acting on data. With real objects, you still have the same essential elements in programming, the same stuff to deal with, but the kinds of things programmers typically think about as "data" are objects/computers in OOP, with intrinsic semantics. So, you're still dealing with things like "2", just as procedures acting on data do, but instead of it being just a "dead" symbol, that can't do anything, "2" has semantics associated with an interface. It's a computer.