[alex_smart]

You can definitely do that in Java too. This is how, e.g., Spring framework handles transactional behavior. It injects a proxy for each bean that is marked as @Transactional and the proxy object handles the coordination with the transaction manager and passes all the arguments to the real object.

[meheleventyone]

Right but it’s not a core part of the language, anything Turing complete can implement this sort of thing. The comment I was replying to was asking about the difference between method calls and message passing.

[alex_smart]

I don't think ability to forward arbitrary messages is any more a core part of Smalltalk than it is of Java.

[meheleventyone]

It’s the basis of the design of Smalltalk (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...) and needs scaffolding in Java to work which does seem significant.