Since they all inherit from Smalltalk all global variables defined in it, it is not necessary to define a special global variable pointing to root in each environment. The inheritance links to the super-environments are used in the lookup for a potentially inherited global variable. As it is custom in Smalltalk, however, we are reminded by uppercase letters that we are accessing global objects. A superclass of SystemDictionary called RootNamespace has to be defined and many of the features of Smalltalk-80 SystemDictionaries will be hosted by that class. Namespace and SystemDictionary will in turn become subclasses of RootNamespace .
Inheritance has to be implemented.
This should return all the objects in the namespace, including those which are inherited. This importance becomes even more crucial in the structured environments which is first of all a framework for class polymorphism. In Smalltalk the classes have the instance variable name which holds the name of the class. Each defined class is included in Smalltalk under this name. In a framework with several environments the class should know the environment in which it has been created and compiled.