This is not something that's going to run fast on a Macintosh ... Use buttons, menus, etc to indicate nouns and to activate verbs. When you indicate a noun, (send it an "indicate" message) it's pushed onto the noun stack. When you activate a verb, (send it an "activate" message) it tries to collect its arguments, if any, from the stack. If it can get all of its arguments, then it is enabled, (sent an "enable message") and can be applied to them. Otherwise, it blocks until all the right arguments are there, possibly prompting for them to be pushed onto the stack or indicated somehow. When a noun is put on the stack, active verbs are given a chance to check for their arguments. (sent "try-to-enable") If one finds the arguments it needs, and whatever other conditions as needed are met, then it could be enabled, (sent "enable" message). Enabled verbs can be applied at the disgression of the user, or at their own disgression. Perhaps they could be a general priority mechanism, and the user can move his focus of attention up and down priority levels, making it more and less automatic. Any enabled verbs above the attention priority are applied, in some automatic order. (What sorts of mechanisms could control the order? This is important.) [A stack/queue? Verbs when they're activated get pushed onto the top. They can manipulate the verb stack if they want.] Somehow integrate multitasking into this. It seems best for each verb to have control over how it's scheduled. The scheduling of enabled verbs at or below the attention level is under control of the user). If there are several enabled verbs, a menu could be presented, giving the choices. The user should be able to select a verb, or keep select more nouns, possibly expanding the list of active verbs. There should be a way to put a noun on the stack that does not automatically invoke any pending verbs that it enables. Adjectives and adverbs can be used as optional arguments. Verbs can consume their arguments and leave results, that in turn might active other pending verbs. They can pend other verbs if they like. Adjectives, nouns nouns and verbs) can be made sticky, so they stay on the stack and aren't consumed. (Perhaps there can be several places verbs look for arguments. Arguments on one stack are consumed, arguments on another aren't. Arguments can be read interactivly from the mouse, by prompting the user to click on an item of some type. Arguments can be taken from the environment, or a defaults file, or calculated somehow. (Along the lines of the gnu emacs "interactive" argument function.)) Activated verbs should be smart about when to enable themselves. They could look for certian patterns of arguments. They could send messages to all the objects asking them about themselves, to see if they qualify. I want to activate a verb that chomps up every "electronic mail address" noun that indicate, appends its textual representation relative to my host to a file (supplied as an arg on the shelf), and sticks it into the right place in a template (also on the shelf), relative to the some other host. There's another active verb that's waiting for a template to be filled out, that when it is will grab it, do some calculations with the fields, poop it out as text, wrap it up, put it in the outgoing mail hopper, and replace it with a fresh one. Templates have classes, and you can send them an "are-you-filled-out" message. They have required and optional fields. They are good to use as arguments of functions. They are generic composite objects, out of which everything else is built. "are-you-filled-out" messages take as an argument a dictionary that is used as a pattern. You can match for keywords being bound, or for keywords both being bound and matching somehow. So a template can be filled out for the purposes of one verb and not another. The "are-you-an-acceptable-argument" message could look at the argument class, and it's acceptable, might send an "are-you-filled-out" message to see if it's qualified. PostScript has no explicit notion of a pointer. A pointer really an (address space, index) pair. i.e. (dict, key), (array, index), (string, index). In order to edit an object, you need a pointer to it, so you can replace it.