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Re: Students/techniques
On 5 Jun 2000, Edward Jason Riedy wrote:
> And dauclair@hotmail.com writes:
> -
> - > Does anyone have experience with less experienced programmers? C++
> - > hackers already know how to battle with a complex language...
> - ...
> ...
> The baggage loads I'd expect from semi-seasoned C++ programmers ares 1)
> don't trust the compiler, and 2) objects are packages of stuff (contain
> methods, too). I'm fishing for examples that the Dylan / CLOS-style
> object systems are still accessible to those people. ...
While brushing up my C++ recently, I realised that C++ actually does have
"generic functions" in one particular limited case: overloaded global
operator methods, like operator+. In fact, you can even reproduce Dylan's
"ambiguous method" problem by
- defining a class C and subclass S
- writing operator+ methods for (C, S) and (S, C)
- calling operator+ on instances (sOne, sTwo) of S
MS VC++ catches this error at compile time, as you might expect from C++.
Now, given that C++ has unary, binary and ternary (?:) operators, it's
maybe not such a big step to "n-ary". The tricky bit would be explaining
to them what "next-method()" does in this context (and why they'd want it
in general, I suppose!)
> I'm also fishing for any actual evidence that they're more accessible to
> beginners.
That I'm not sure of.
Hugh
References: