Anyway, one thing he points out is the ability to supply a default initial value for a data member when it is declared,
and not have to specify that value as an initializer in every contructor (though it has that effect). He says (implied
all) other OO languages can't do that.
Just for the record (and you quite possibly realize this
already), it is possible to do this in Common Lisp by specifying an
:initform argument in the slot definition for a class. In fact,
as the name suggests, you can do even better than specify a
value; you can specify any initialization form you want.
I can't think exactly how you'd do in in Smalltalk, though you can
of course simulate it a bit (as you can in many other languages)
by defining a hierarchy of constructors that call each other,
supplying defaults along the way.
