Classes as Packages (was: Harvesting infrastructure)

tblanchard at mac.com tblanchard at mac.com
Mon Nov 18 09:26:45 UTC 2002


On Sunday, November 17, 2002, at 09:01  PM, Anthony Hannan wrote:

>> Anthony Hannan <ajh18 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>>> What about classes as packages as per my recent email entitled "Class
>>> Dependencies".  I really think we should consider this.
>
>

My visceral reaction to this is ICK!

I think inheritance is way overworked as a composition mechanism.  
There are other more interesting techniques that have been 
underutilized including delegation and forwarding and method 
categories.  I do more ObjectiveC than ST and ObjC has method 
categories - loadable groups of methods that you can add to a class 
anytime you like without recompiling.  This lets you add behavior to a 
class without really changing its type.  (Inheritance generally 
indicates type - which is different from protocol).

Your MI approach sounds something like categories - but adds fuzzy 
typing ideas too I think.

Maybe I don't entirely understand your proposal - but suppose a package 
requires the addition of a bit of behavior to Object - will Object now 
derive from something else too?

Todd Blanchard




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