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Re: Q: member syntax in dylan?
On Thursday, May 10, 2001, at 02:45 pm, Roland Paterson-Jones wrote:
> OK, understood. Is there any way in dylan of achieving the required
> semantics with this or some similar syntax?
I'm not sure. I think the parser will eat the case I gave before
anything else you could do. A macro might work, but I don't know how.
> The motivation is, of course, that it's fun to associate methods with
> their
> class,
Classes don't have methods in Dylan. It takes a bit of a mental leap to
accept this (especially coming from a Java background), but once this is
made the Dylan way really is better.
> particularly when their are no multi-dispatch issues. I believe that
> this encourages object-oriented programming (having come, of course,
> from
> java and c++).
It encourages retaining the feel of a particular variety of OOP, but it
also encourages "bad habits" from C++/Java (I say this as someone who's
programmed C++ and Java professionally and far prefers Dylan).
> I have the feeling that, most of the time, methods I write would be (in
> effect) single-dispatched on one (the first) argument.
Probably, but they will still be generic function methods. Think of a
hierarchy of methods parallel to your hierarchy of data objects, all
friend's with each other.
See Michael Richter's posting on classes and methods in Dylan for a
better explanation than I can give:
http://www.gwydiondylan.org/mtr-on-dylan.txt
- Rob.
References: