Philosophy and object systems (was Re: goops/guile doc)

[Lalo Martins <lalo at webcom dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2000 at 11:53:54PM +0000, Neil Jerram wrote:
> 
> Placing methods inside classes, for example, is to do with the
> syntactic sugar of the implicit self argument, and preferring one of
> the arguments over the others, which, in general, is wrong.  This
> leads to programmers having to invent the double dispatch mechanism
> and worrying which class should contain the code for an algorithm that
> maps an Image object onto a Surface object.

Hmm no, it has to do with the original concept of classes
``knowing how to perform operations themselves''. Has to do
more with philosophy and terminology than technical matters.
It's what I mean when I say ``tell the image to render on this
surface'' rather than ``render this image on this surface''.

Generics aren't a better sollution - or a worse one. They're
different. A completely different approach. By 198x standards
they wouldn't even be recognized as OOP ;-)

(Of course, as with most of life, the ``best'' sollution is
probably a combination of these two, but with stress on the
``probably'' as I haven't taken the time to think this trough.)

[]s,
                                               |alo
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