We’re allotted 30 minutes for these presentations, less with time for questions, meaning that we are allotted about the same amount time as an American television situation comedy, including commercials.
	There was a time during my misspent youth when I’d take this time to try to methodically demonstrate to the twelve people in the room who already had the background to really appreciate it just how diabolically / ingeniously clever this work is. But given the nature, and the history of this work, I’m not going to do that now.
	Instead, I’m going to divide the talk into five sections. First, we’ll examine what multimethods are, what they are not, and what they are good for. Then we’ll look at what they look like. Next, we’ll look at what it means to implement the bulk of one of the most interesting and refined metaobject architectures on top of the other one. We’ll then explore our multimethod implementations, and their relative performance. Finally, we’ll try to place this work in the context of some of the broader currents flowing through the research community, and try to gauge the enduring significance (if any) of all of this.
	Academics are veritable novelty vampires. They crave that which is new, and research contributions must usual pander to these appetites. This work is rather unusual in that it is the culmination of line of research much of which was already complete seven or eight years ago. From the fact that we are here at all, one is tempted to conclude that this work must have aged well; that the program committee must have seen something of enduring value here.
	I gather Scotsmen are fond of washing down Caledonian cuisine like haggis with something they call Single Malt Scotch, which, I’m told it tastes something like paint thinner poured over a tire fire. I gather it tastes even worse when it is fresh, and that it is somewhat more palatable after it has festered in an oak barrel for several years. We presented a sneak preview of some of this work, back when it was fresher, at ECOOP ’98. We hope you’ll find that time has made it more palatable.