Guide is designed as a set of distributed services, which may be viewed as the upper layers of a distributed operating system. It provides location transparency of network resources to the application layer. It is a convenient tool for developing transparently distributed applications that use persistent data. 1.1 Description Guide uses persistent objects, i.e. the object's lifetime is not related to the execution of programs, but the object is in existence as long as at least one other persistent object refers to it.
Objects encapsulate a set of data and a set of procedures.
A type describes the behavior shared by all objects of that type. A class defines a specific implementation of a type. Classes are used to generate instances. The Guide language supports this object model. It is a strongly typed language with conformity, single inheritance and persistent objects.