[repsilat]

> How do you tell the difference between an object that is the String class, and an object that represents the String class?

Hah, I think "an object that is the String class" begs the question :-). I think that `String.class` is an object because you can do objecty things with it (call methods, assign it to a variable etc) and `String` is not an object because you can't do any of those things with it.

To me they're not the same kind of thing, though they're intimately, inseparably and exclusively related. I personally would say even if

  new String()

was just syntactic sugar for

  String.class.newInstance()

, and all other "bare" uses of `String` were similarly shorthands for operations on `String.class`, I'd still hesitate to say that `String` itself was an object.

My logic is probably less useful than yours, though. I'd say "`A` is a `class`, but `a` is an instance of `Class`" and in your system where `A` and `a` are "the same thing" there's no difference between being a `class` and being an instance of `Class`. Because the things appear in different namespaces (as you say), and are related one-to-one, we could as well say they are two ways to refer to "the same thing", with different operations possible "depending on the phrasing."

Shrugs, it doesn't come naturally to me, but it's at least a self-consistent system.