2.4 The Shell

The Shell pattern is the superpattern of all objects that may be instantiated directly by an ensemble, and may in most respects be thought of as modeling an executable. An instance of the Shell pattern corresponds to an operating system process with an address space of its own. Non-shell objects reside in the address space provided by some shell. The Shell is also a remoteable ^[3], and may therefore provide services to remote objects. As seen from other, possibly remote, objects, a Shell instance is just another kind of object with a well defined interface.

A Shell instance knows the ensemble on which it is running through the myEnsemble reference.