Stefs roadmap for 3.9, time to get it nailed down

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Feb 26 18:08:54 UTC 2005


>
> Perhaps. I do think that the Traits documentation focuses rather 
> heavily on
> "re-engineering" or "refactoring" existing code. While this is 
> certainly
> necessary and helpful, the Traits documentation could stand a better
> description of how it can be used to write new code and then maintain 
> it.

There is the methology paper ICSE 2004. And the one of ESUG
(but we are fed up about writing papers on traits :) since this is not 
research anymore
for us.

> There is nothing you could write in Traits that couldn't be written by 
> copying
> methods between classes. It's just that it's much harder to maintain 
> code
> written in that way. And the automatic analysis and grouping of 
> methods into
> Traits is a powerful adjunct to (or replacement of) method categories.

Exact.
Compared with mixin, traits offers an explicit conflict resolution, 
where the composing
entity (the class or a trait) has the total control. and this is 
basically the main difference
with mixins and which makes traits more robust to changes.




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