Boy, I'm coming late to this party. Sorry about that. The following is asked in the interest of understanding your (and by extrapolation Tye's) points. It may seem that I'm supporting Ovid's point, but really the most accurate statement of my position is "confused".

If in the examples in the OP, the data about the Creature package were extracted to, say, XML, could you then call this a "framework for declarative creation of classes"? It seems to me that this constitutes the details to be filled in by the application programmer. I haven't used Hibernate, but wouldn't that be just one level down from what Hibernate does (declarative objects, plus how they relate, whereas this would be just declarative objects)? Does it matter whether those details are provided by the application programmer as XML (like in my hypothetical) or as structured code (like the original example)?

I guess part of Ovid's point was to explore the grey areas in the use of the term and now I feel caught up in that gery area. Again, I ask for the sake of clarification. I don't have skin in the game either way.

Goibhniu stops previewing, takes a deep breath and pushes create . . .